CHAPTER XXI
THE QUARREL
In less than forty-eight hours after her arrival in Brighton, Mrs. Baxter had completely recovered from the shock of her midnight encounter with the Gray Lady. On the afternoon of the second day she sat in the window of her fifth floor suite at the Metropole watching the fluttering, swaying, glittering procession on the promenade below, a frolic of glad colors that might have sworn at each other in a ballroom the night before now mingling happily together in the golden urbanity of the sunshine. Some such thought must have formed itself in Eleanor's mind as she suddenly exclaimed. "You can really wear any color on a day like this!"
Mrs. Baxter called to the maid who was moving about in an adjoining bedroom, "Oh, Gibson, did I bring my sapphire voile with the duchesse lace? Thank you—I was afraid it had been left."
"And the cerise foulard?—Oh—good!"
On the lower promenade the people looked like colored beads, and still further away, on the dazzling white of the sands, they were minute dark specks. Low against the blue wall of sky hung the ocean like an indigo blackboard on which figures in white chalk wrote and rewrote and rubbed themselves out with magical monotony.
The wind blowing whither it listed raised an edge of the muslin curtain and drew it softly across Eleanor's cheek and in the ocean of femininity below her window a bright colored wave swelled and tossed and broke in lawny froth.
"What a windy place!" Eleanor drew a deep breath and inwardly exulted as she recalled the lavender scented contents of the largest and lightest of her trunks.
Meanwhile Betty was taking a lonely walk on the gayly crowded upper promenade. Her sense of desolation was intensified by the hubbub of voices about her, the laughter, the shrieks of distant bathers, the throb of a far off brass band, the cry of a man selling shrimps somewhere below.
It would have been hard to devise a program less pleasing to Mr. Baxter's secretary, than this trip to Brighton. Ipping House was, at this moment, the one and only place on earth where she wished to be. At Ipping House she could, at least, have kept an eye on Kate Clendennin. There was no mistaking the countess' designs on Bob. Betty's hatred of the countess was temperamental, the hatred of the tendril haired blonde for the straight haired blonde.
Elizabeth Thompson clenched her fingers as she thought of her old playmate helpless in the toils of that unscrupulous woman. There was no question in Betty's mind about Kate's power of attraction, yet at this moment the only thing she envied the countess was her unique gift for what is sometimes called "language." She was sorely tempted to borrow a few tonic words from Kate Clendennin's vocabulary.