“But I can show you the pictures now,” she said in a tone of quiet challenge.
“What have the pictures got to do with us?” he demanded, resenting the intrusion of a workaday world on that moment of tensed emotion.
“Everything,” the girl told him. “That’s why you must see them.”
“When?” he asked, resenting not only her movement away from him but also the manner in which the trivialities of his calling could so stubbornly re-impose themselves on his moments of exaltation.
“It will have to be like our meeting to-night—without their knowing. I’ll send you word in some way—in the morning. But it will have to be secret. And now I must go!”
“That way?” he challenged, with bitterness in his voice.
She came to a stop, staring at him through the dusk for a moment of silence. Then she slowly lifted her arms, and as slowly stepped across the filtered moonlight until she came to where he stood waiting for her.
CHAPTER SIX
It was early the next day that a sandy-headed small boy brought a note to Conkling at his hotel in Weston. The note was from Julia Keswick. It merely said “Come at once.”
The brevity of that note disturbed him, but he lost no time in responding to its summons. When, as he started out, he once more caught sight of Lavinia Keswick in the old family chariot, this time proceeding somberly down the main street of Weston, he interpreted that migration as a ponderable reason for the hurried summons. But he remained ill at ease, even as he crossed the parched lawn and dispersed the ducks gabbling about the house front.