CHAPTER II
FOUR BEING NO COMPANY
I
Happy in his newly-found domestic delights, Mr. Rawn was perhaps more careless than otherwise he would have been regarding business affairs, and that at a time when they needed care. The truth was that matters still lagged at the factory, as Rawn ought to have known. Indeed, he did know; but always his curious helplessness in regard to Halsey—who alone knew the last secrets of the most intricate devices of the company's property—continued to oppress him. And always here was his wife to console him and to interest him.
The distance between Graystone Hall and the factory apparently was becoming greater from month to month. Sometimes Halsey came to visit his wife, but these visits of late became fewer and fewer, as that lady became more and more discontented, less and less eager to receive the attentions of him who had so signally failed to place her where Virginia sat in power. This alone left Halsey none too happy himself at the prospect of any of his perfunctory calls; and moreover, he found himself expected now to be more careful in his attire, in his conduct about Graystone Hall, where full evening dress tacitly was desired at dinner, and where an aristocratic chill was habitual at any hour; things not customary in Ann Sullivan's household on the factory side of the city. Not that Halsey needed to excite social misgivings. He was a clean-faced, manly chap, lean, sinewy and strong, and might, save for his rather toil-marked hands, have passed for any of the throng of young men who at times came under one pretense or other to visit Mr.—and Mrs.—Rawn.
II
These, in company with Grace, he one evening found alone, seated on the wide gallery that overlooked the lake front. He did notice then, as he never before at any time had noticed, a singular truth—Virginia Rawn's eyes seemed almost reluctant to leave him. He was half her husband's age. Moreover, there was something in the somber glow of his eye, in the occasional look of his face—rapt, absorbed, remote, pondering on things not made patent to all about him—which held for her ever a stronger fascination. She wondered if things were known in his philosophy no longer reckoned in her own; but which once might have been germane to her as well. She often looked at him.
The evening was clear and cool, the lake stirred with no more than a gentle breeze. The silver ladder of the moon's light was flung down across the gently moving waters. The breath of flowers was all about. Calm, ease, assuredness were here. The voice of the hostess was delightfully low and sweet. All things seemed in keeping.
Rawn welcomed his son-in-law with his customary largeness of air. "Come on out, Charles," said he, "join us; the evening is pleasant. Won't you have a cigar?" He fetched with his own hands the box of weeds—"Take several, my boy, take as many as you like. I give two dollars apiece for these by the box at my club, and you can't beat them in the city or anywhere else."
Halsey listened almost absent-mindedly, and Rawn returned to his seat near his wife, a little apart on the gallery. The master of Graystone Hall was intoxicated more than usually this evening with her. She sat now in the dim light, a cool, dainty and beautiful picture, in blue and ivory Duchesse satin and filmy laces, gowned fit for a wedding or a ball, as she always was of an evening at home, with just a gem gleaming here and there in the occasional glimpse of light which broke through the windows at the back of the gallery as their curtains shifted in the breeze. At that moment John Rawn would have been glad to have the entire world share boxes of cigars with him. John Rawn, collector—what man on all the North Shore Drive at that moment could claim such surroundings as these?