Getting away from the house the next night was not so easy.
Several guests came from town in the afternoon. She was obliged to stay down until the last, had difficulty in preventing Josephine Burroughs from following her into her room to chatter for an hour or longer. All evening, as her father lingered in the drawing-room, she had forced herself to act in her gayest, most unconcerned manner. Her nerves were on edge and she had a fever. She knew the servants were closing the house in mad haste. There was no time to change dress or even shoes; there was just time to send her maid away, to catch up a long wrap, turn out her lights and dart downstairs. Probably no one was yet in bed, but she must take the chance of some accidental late call upon her. As she raised the window in the gray salon she confidently expected to hear the bells, to be dazzled by sudden flash of lights. She did not breathe until she had it lowered.
It was after midnight. She congratulated herself on having fixed one o’clock as the hour for the meeting. She would have just time to reach the little cataract. She had not gone far before her slippers were in a dreadful state and her legs wet to the knees. “The excitement’s the only thing that can save me from the cold of my life,” thought she. Colds were serious matters with her—disfiguring, desperately uncomfortable, slow to take leave. Long before she reached the lower end of the lake she could feel that her dress was a bedraggled wreck, high though she had held it. As she went along the rough shore path she glanced from time to time at the meeting place on the opposite side. The moon made everything distinct; he was not there. Had it taken her longer to come than she thought, and had he gone? Or had he disregarded her note? Or had he not yet got it? “I don’t believe I’ll dare come again,” she said to herself despondently. But she knew that she would.
She crossed the brook on the stones that fretted it. She reached the place where she could see the grass worn by his working at his easel, the mud of the lake’s brim creased by the keel of her canoe. She looked all round, straining her eyes into the dimness under the trees.
“Chang!” she called.
She gazed, listened, waited. “Chang!” she called again, a sob in her voice.
From the deep shadow of the maple tree immediately in front of her came Roger’s voice: “Some one is coming toward us in a boat.”
“Don’t move!” she exclaimed in an undertone. “No matter what happens, don’t show yourself. I must speak quickly,” she hurried on. “That money you said you had—you must sell out whatever it’s invested in and put it in Government bonds—right away. Will you? Promise me!”
“I can’t,” replied he. “It’s in bonds of the Wauchong Railroad, that’s just gone into the hands of a receiver.”