A promise having been exacted that the "triad" should accompany her to the early railway train, Devota went swiftly down a rear staircase to the side corridor running in front of the library. The door was open, and from the threshold she looked in. The room was well lighted; the typewriting machine at rest, the desk covered with official documents, and from a file at one side a sheaf of telegrams rustled as the air surged through the window. The sole occupant of the apartment was the secretary, Mr. Walton, seated before a tray-laden table. He had dined, and was dallying with a gilded liqueur glass in which iced Chartreuse sparkled like splintered emeralds.
Doubtless Governor Armitage was the centre of attraction in the drawing-room, and the auspicious moment had passed beyond recall. A premonition of defeat impaired her self-control, and shrinking from observation, Devota walked down the corridor to an arched door, whence a flight of steps led to the flower garden.
Avoiding the stone terrace in front, where an electric globe shone, she turned into a winding path bordered on both sides with wheeled boxes filled with tall pink oleanders in profuse bloom. A mid-summer full moon lighted every corner of the sloping lawn, bringing into velvety relief the shadow vignettes traced by leaf and vine across the smoothly clipped grass, and adding a silvery lustre to beds of lilies that lifted their white lips to drink from Hersé's cool, dripping palms.
Among Mr. Churchill's valued curios he numbered a quaint sun dial of black lava, fashioned ages ago in an Ægean isle riven by volcanic throes.
The gnomon had been destroyed, and erosion by time and storm partly erased the Greek characters on the base, but doubtless some pagan Le Nôtre once deemed it an ornamental altar to the great sun god. A prosaic new gardener at "The Oleanders" found it more useful as a mere pedestal, whereon he had placed a terra cotta vase filled with luxuriant nasturtiums that wove over the whole a fringe of scarlet and orange.
Devota stood beside the dial, and silently wrestled with emotions habitually held in bondage by an iron will. The night had grown very still; only a faint breath of air now and then pilfered and strewed the attar of oleanders and lilies, and from rock-ribbed shore rose the solemn, monotonous ocean hymn, the immemorial recessional chanted by shattered waves.
An overwhelming sorrow seized and shook the lonely woman standing by the dial. She threw up her arms, as if in mute appeal to some tragic fate, and her fingers gripped and wrung each other; then the clenched hands fell upon the crown and garlands of nasturtiums, and she closed her eyes to shut out torturing retrospective visions.
An overwhelming sorrow seized and shook the lonely woman by the dial