With the waning afternoon the veil of the rain lifted and showed the long hook of the coast edged with leaping breakers, and a hurly-burly of high clouds tearing across the sky. The sun went down with streamers of yellow through the breaking storm. But the voice of the ocean grew louder with the wilder wind, until by fall of night its pulse was in the very timbers of the house. Its tumult assailed the very doors.
The house-party met over the tea-cups with such a sense of excitement as they might have felt aboard ship in a gale, an exhilaration that, by its feverishness, was the reaction from the depression of their immurement.
It was the last of the rain, Holden predicted; and the expectation of release dashed them all into high spirits.
Julia was gorgeous. If she had not been so beautiful she might have seemed overdone. She was alluring; she laughed and murmured to Thair until he was overwhelmed by the beauty of it. If he looked at her with all the admiration he gave to Gainsborough’s lovely, pictured ladies—and coveted her to frame and hang in his gallery—there was no reason Mrs. Budd should not imagine he coveted her to decorate the foot of his table. The memory of Cissy’s uncomfortable suggestions were confused with what seemed the near consummation of her hopes; but for the first time in forty-eight hours she beamed.
Longacre was talking pointedly and exclusively to Florence. Cissy once or twice tried to throw in a word. She got a glance, an assent without the obstinate head turning in her direction. It was stupendous rudeness, but he was oblivious to everything but his need of Florence. He wanted her responsiveness, her sympathy, to help him escape his tormenting self. He talked rapidly. He seemed eager. He was angry that her coldness left him keenly aware of the palpitating presence of the girl who flashed her dark eyes so hotly around the room.
But Florence read in his eagerness its double element. Her throat ached with the fullness of tears.
Weeks, months ago, when she had first felt the subtle change in him, so slight that she had resolutely called it fancy, that terrible possibility of another woman had given her some sleepless nights; but she had hoped, as her knowledge grew, that it was a negative fate—one of the slow changes time brings about in mind and body—that was drawing the man she loved away from her. She had made herself ready to meet such a fatality, but the calamity that came was unexpected. It had her by surprise; and at the outset she had failed of everything she had determined on.
She was not a jealous woman, but she had not realized how it would seem to have him love another woman.
And what was this woman? Beautiful overwhelmingly, unquestionably to be reckoned with, but ignorant—a child! What was she going to be? What could she be to him? A spur or a clog? Florence knew the man too well to suppose he would shake off the latter. He would endure, and grow less. It seemed bitter to her, then, that he was a man who could be made or marred by a woman, and she not that woman.
“What is the matter?” she heard him saying. The face he turned to her showed his irritation. Wouldn’t he yet face it—that he loved the girl? It was proof to Florence of what power she had with him.