“It would be a danger if her friends couldn’t bear her out in believing it to be justified.”
Unable to face any more of this subtle flattery, I was obliged to let the subject drop.
The lunch was like any other lunch. As an unimportant person at a gathering where every one knew every one else more or less intimately, I was to some extent at liberty to follow my own thoughts, which were not altogether happy ones. For telling what I had to tell, the necessity had grown urgent. What was lacking, what had always seemed to be lacking, was the positive opportunity. This I resolved to seek; but suddenly I found it before me.
This was toward the middle of the afternoon, when the party had broken up. It had broken up imperceptibly by dissolving into groups that strolled about the lawns and descended the long flights of steps leading to the beach below. As I had not been seated near Miss Barry at table, it was no more than civil for me to approach her when the party was on the veranda and the lawn. Our right to privacy was recognized at once by a withdrawal of the rest of the company. It was probably assumed that I was to be the fourth in the series of experiments of which Jim Hunter and Stephen Cantyre had been the second and the third; and, though my fellow-guests might be sorry for me, they would not intervene to protect me.
Considering it sufficient to make their adieux to Mrs. Barry, they left us undisturbed in a nook of one of the verandas. Here we were out of sight of any of the avenues and pathways to the house, and Mrs. Barry was sufficiently in sympathy with our desire to be alone not to send any one in search of us. On the lawn robins were hopping, and along the edge of shorn grass the last foxgloves made upright lines of color against the olive-green scrub-oak. Far down through the trees one caught the silvery glinting of water.
The sounds of voices and motor wheels having died away, Miss Barry said, languidly: “I think they must be all gone. They’ll say I’m terribly rude to keep myself out of sight. But it’s lovely here, isn’t it? And this is such a cozy spot in which to smoke and have coffee. I read here, too, and— Oh, dear, what’s happening?”
It was then that the little accident which was to play so large a part in my life occurred. She had leaned forward from her wicker chair to set her empty coffee-cup on the table. As she did so the string of pearls which she wore at the opening of her simple white dress loosened itself and slipped like a tiny snake to the floor of the veranda. From a corresponding chair on the other side of the table I sprang up and stooped. When I raised myself with the pearls in my right hand I slipped them into my pocket.
Between the fingers of my left hand I held a lighted cigar. Bareheaded, I was wearing white flannels and tennis shoes. Now that the moment had come, I felt extraordinarily cool—as cool as on the night when I had slipped this string of pearls into my pocket before. I looked down and smiled at her. Leaning back in her chair, she looked up and smiled at me.
I shall always see her like that—in white with a slash of silk of the red of her lips somewhere about her waist, and a ribbon of the same round her dashing Panama hat. Her feet in little brown shoes were crossed. With an elbow on the arm of her chair, she held a small red fan out from her person, though she wasn’t actively using it.