"Well, I'm rather leaving the sunlight now," he admitted. "I'm painting gray. I'm converting it into terms of winter storm and equinox. Last year a ship was pounded to pieces in the bay while the people on Commercial street looked helplessly on. It was the same sea, but it wasn't smiling then. It wore the vindictive scowl of death. That's the mood which has made this strip of coast a grave-yard of dead ships. That's the mood, too, which has given color to the people's thought—or taken the color out of it, leaving it stout and faded like weatherbeaten timbers—making of it the untrustworthy thought of melancholia."
"And am I the spirit of that picture, too?"
"You are the exact antithesis of all that, but you are threatening to fade into its grayness—and to deaden all the glow that was on the palette with which God painted you."
They walked slowly back to the verandah, but paused a space before going into the light and crowds where a waltz had just begun—and as they waited a hotel page came dodging between the smoking, chatting loungers calling her name—"Miss Conscience Williams—Miss Conscience Williams," and waving a yellow telegraph envelope.
The girl's face paled a little as she took the message from the urchin's hand and her eyes widened in an expression of fear. But she tore the covering and drew out the sheet deliberately, reading in the yellow light that flooded through a window. Then an almost inaudible groan came from her lips and she stood holding the paper so loosely that it slipped from her fingers and drifted to the floor. Stuart retrieved it and handed it to her, but she only commanded in a stunned voice, "Read it."
The man stepped from the shadow to the light and read:
"Your father had paralytic stroke. He wants to see you."
It was signed by initials which Stuart inferred to be those of the elderly aunt of whom she spoken. He laid his hand very gently on her arm and turned her a step to the side so that she passed out of the broad band of window-light and stood in the shadow. The blaze from the interior gave too much the effect of a spotlight playing on her eyes and lips and brow, for him to be willing that the idling crowds of strollers should read what he read there. He knew that in a moment she would regain control sufficiently to face even the fuller publicity inside, but during that moment she had the right to the limited privacy afforded by the dark shadow of the tiled veranda.
She stood leaning against the wall for a moment, then she straightened herself with an effort and pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples.