XVIII
The morning after the departure of Flood and Pendleton, Eleanor and Rosamund went out to the veranda for their usual after-breakfast "breath of air," and stood arm in arm, looking over the long slopes which had been the theater of their wonderful ten days' sport. Apparently the same thought came to them simultaneously. They looked at each other and smiled.
"Did you ever see any place so empty?" Eleanor asked.
Rosamund shook her head. "I never did," she said. "Isn't it absurd?"
"It's like being in a room when the clock stops!" said Eleanor, and Rosamund laughed.
"Isn't it curious how much of the city feeling those two brought with them? Before they came I felt as if New York were miles—oh, continents—away. This place was home, the center of the universe. Now—well, now this is 'way off in the country'!"
Eleanor laughed understandingly. "I know! And yet not once while they were here did we do anything we should have done in town! No one so much as mentioned bridge!"
"It must have been Marshall's presence," said Rosamund. "Certainly Mr. Flood never suggests town to me!" She flushed, remembering what their last talk of New York had led to. He had taken it so well, proved himself so completely the master of his emotions, shown her so gently that he held her blameless and still supreme, that she had never liked him so much as after having shown him how little she liked him!
Eleanor looked at her curiously, for she suspected something of what had passed the day before; but she had cause to look at her wonderingly more and more, in the days that followed, days which, for Rosamund, soon became filled with mixed emotions.