TO-MORROW’S” sun rose on a miraculous world that dripped and steamed, and breathed a thousand sweet scents into a cloudless sky. The coast road, white for five months with flying dust, was black, with flashing pools of water among the trees. Their leaves, so long powdered pale with summer, were glistening green, shaking in the wind that was subsiding slowly. The breakers still bellowed up the little beaches and battered the rocky promontories; but they were sapphire-blue till their crests curled over,—no longer tattered by the wind, but breaking, far as eye could follow around the coast, in long white semicircles of foam.
“Miramar” was flung wide to this morning of “latter spring,” and the multitudinous sharp odors of the garden poured through open doors and windows. The house was unpeopled. All were abroad in the garden, strolling down the spongy paths, shaking cataracts of drops from dahlia and chrysanthemum in their passing; whistling up the dogs across the terraces; calling to one another—scattering and rallying.
Theirs was a high, animal pulse—such relish and excitement of living as a runner has who pulls himself together for a leap. Those purposes and emotions that had had their growth in the thick atmosphere of the storm were quickened, pressing against circumstance, ready to burst out. They boded a crisis.
Julia Budd’s face alone was assurance of happenings as she came across the lawn with her long, free step, her skirts picked high, her dachshunds in leash. Eyes lowering, mouth smiling, she looked neither at Bessie Lewis on her right, nor Thair on her left, but talked rapidly, apparently for any ears that cared to listen. Now she quickened her pace, took the path border in a leap, and had a hand on Holden’s arm.
“Mr. Thair says it’s too heavy going for the hunt!” She threw it out, less a plea than a flat statement.
“Good heavens, young woman!” Holden’s eye ran over the dripping terraces. “They won’t have the dogs out to-day!”
“M’m,” she nodded emphatically. “I rang up the club before breakfast, and the M. F. H. says, ‘Yes.’”
Holden grunted. “They’ll mire in a minute.”
She thrust out her shoe, damp but unmuddied, with a laugh. She called out his broadest smile.
“It’s another thing down there.” He indicated the “sea meadows” with a back motion of the head. “If we fellows break our necks it doesn’t matter; but you ladies—wait till next week!”