Victoria sat down in the shadow near one of the windows and looked out into the night. Her room was next to that of her aunt, and over the dining-room. Beneath her window was the shrubbery in which Katherine had heard the suspicious sounds a short time since. Beyond lay the flower garden, the beds bathed in the moonlight, and the roses lifting their heads to catch the dew. On the other side of the flower garden was the vegetable patch, and beyond that again the pasture and the woods.
The window near which she sat was directly above the bay-window of the dining-room, the roof of which projected from the side of the house. Vines grew up over the dining-room window and had been trained on either side of Victoria’s, so that in summer time she looked through a veritable bower of green, and this year a pair of bluebirds had built their nest there and sometimes wakened her in the early dawn with their sweet singing.
Victoria sat for a long time quite motionless. She heard her aunt come up to her room and, after a half-hour of activity, subside into the tranquillity of night. She felt it to be a merciful arrangement of human affairs and habits that people were forced to rest for a few hours out of the twenty-four, otherwise the stirring nature of Mrs. Wentworth Ward would know no calm.
She heard Katherine mount to her rooms in the third story, and Honor go to hers on the other side of the house.
At last all was still. Victoria’s brain, wide awake and unusually alert for this hour of the night, was still occupied with the tiresome topics of the afternoon. She felt that she could not sleep until she had imparted some of the new ideas with which it was teeming to some one, and that some one must be Honor. Her sister could not yet be asleep, Victoria thought; so leaving her window wide open, she went across the hall and around the gallery to Honor’s room and knocked softly on the door. Her sister opened it at once.
“What is the matter, Vic?” she asked. “Are you ill? Why, you are still in your dress, and you came up two hours ago!”
“I know it. Hush, Honor, don’t speak so loud! I don’t want any one to hear me. Do you mind if I come in and talk? Are you very sleepy?”
“No, not a bit sleepy. Come in, of course. I want especially to see you. What is the matter, Vic? You have looked so anxious all the afternoon, and not a bit like yourself. What is it?”
“It is all Aunt Sophia,” said Victoria, curling herself up on the foot of the bed.
“Aunt Sophia! Why, what has she been saying? I thought you were too busy, when you were with her, to talk.”