She stood up, dizzy, gathering her breath to say what she had to say. But he pushed her back gently into her chair, with a smile that was both a little shy and a little proprietary. Then he slipped out of the room with his light and panther-like step, leaving her with the bed-rock of existence no longer merely undulating, but fallen utterly away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Since thinness of skin seems to stand an immediate though unhappy corollary to blueness of blood, Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, being an aristocrat, even if one under protest, found herself without that indurated armor which protects her humbler fellow-beings from the buffets and shocks of fate. So her spirit still winced at the thought of what she had passed through. Her body still alternately flushed with indignation and chilled with a tangle of fears. Something, she knew, was about to happen, was bound to happen. Yet what this was she had neither the power nor the inclination to fathom. She merely waited, sure only of the recurring waves of desolation which beat upon her soul. She even struggled to escape from this denuding loneliness, the next morning, by trying to lose herself in her work. But so small and trivial did that work now stand to her that it seemed like trying to bury her bruised and burning body in a bird-bath.
Yet by both temperament and habit, she was averse to passivity. She hated the thought of sitting back in vague but enveloping apprehension of the unknown. She reached a point, in fact, where she would have been willing to see the blue deliver its bolt, where she would have welcomed, for the sheer relief of action, the end of that deluding interregnum of silence.
She started nervously, none the less, when her telephone bell broke the silence, an hour later, for that shrill of sound suddenly translated itself into something as ominous as the starting-gong of undefined combat. She even hesitated, for a moment, as to whether or not she would answer that call. But besides being tired of silence and indecision she was a person of habitual promptitude in movement. So temperament in the end asserted itself. With a deep breath, she took the receiver from its hook and answered the call.
“This is William Shotwell, the senior member of the firm of Shotwell, Attridge and Bannister, speaking,” a suave and dignified voice announced over the wire, once she had acknowledged her identity. “And I’ve been wondering, Miss Hayden, if it would be convenient for you to drop down to my office some time this afternoon for a short conference?”
“And what would the nature and object of that conference be?” inquired Teddie, as coolly as she was able.
“That, I’m afraid, is a matter it would be inexpedient to discuss over the telephone,” was the none too tranquillizing response. “But I might mention that the client whose interests I am compelled to look after in this case is Mr. Raoul Uhlan, the well-known portrait-painter.”
A cold chill crept slowly up through Teddie’s body.
“I really don’t think it would be possible for me to come down to your office,” she said in an exceptionally controlled voice. She was going to add “Either this afternoon or any other afternoon,” but instinct told her to suppress the impulse.