Her whiteness flickered among the shadows as she fled; and he followed.
He caught her in the sun, at the door of the glass room.
“Oh, you!” he said, a little breathless, and laughing up at her from the steps below.
She looked at him silently, still of a mind for flight, her hand on the door. It opened suddenly inward, and presented them, face to face, with Holden, who stood, hands jammed into the bulging pockets of his old shooting-coat.
“You folks don’t care much for your complexions, out there in the hot sun,” he said. But he looked at Florence.
CHAPTER VII
THE HOUSE-PARTY IN THE STORM
THE breeze, which at noon had barely rustled the chrysanthemums, an hour later was tossing the pampas plumes across the lawn, and whipping the great sapphire of the sea into broken green and white. There was something ruffling to temper in the dry, beating breath. Hammocks were empty, the garden deserted. The hardiest of the house-party huddled on the veranda behind the Samoan blinds that snapped in the heavy wind. It was not the “trade” blowing in from sea—salt and dreamy with far going—but a land wind driving down through the mountains, stinging with sharp odors of dust and dry leaves—the very dregs of summer.
The sun went down through a wrack of broken clouds into a thundering ocean. To the party gathered around the hall hearth, and straggling up to the first turn of the stair, the garden appeared a writhing, twisting thing, crowded upon, and threatened by the raw, gray twilight. Bowed trees and lashing vines were the more piteous that there was no storm but the ceaseless wind streaming by, roaring across the roof, shaking the window-casings, beating the flowers flat.
The wild night offered to those about the fire the opportunity of drawing together; but the uneasiness, the inexplicable, mutual distrust of people aware of strong cross-currents under the surface of living, separated them. Their common isolation, even their common shelter, failed to unite them.