Through the open doors of the reception-hall he heard voices from somewhere out of sight over the dip of the terrace. The hall was empty of all but a slim, Spanish-eyed maid wiping down the wainscoting. She thought that Mrs. Essington was in her room. She carried up-stairs the card Longacre wrote upon. He waited, tossing over the accumulations of the morning’s mail.
A dog came and sat in the open door, his tail beating the mat with expectation of attention. It was one of Julia’s dachshunds. There flashed back to Longacre, with all the colors and odors keen as if actual, the picture of the girl standing tall and flushed on the dripping grass, tossing pebbles down the terrace.
He felt a sharp contraction of heart. That memory made what he was about to do unendurable.
Pinioned between his alternatives, his eye caught his own name on an envelope that carried a New York postmark. He took it up slowly. He read the letter-head. This was what he had been waiting for for months. This was to have made the turn in his life. Now a quite different thing had made it. The turn was a wrench. Everything, beside it, was insignificant.
He ripped open the letter with indifference. He read it with his brain still tortured with his quandary, and got no meaning from it, only an impression that it was not what he had expected. He re-read the cautious sentences, this time with attention.
There had been some lack of authority for the final decision in the last communication from the Metropolitan Opera Syndicate. On account of—he got through the list of reasons to the closing sentence—the Syndicate could not, after all, arrange to produce the “Harold.”
He stood looking at the hand that held the envelop while the blood gathered in his face. A year of unsparing labor, a year of wire-pulling and waiting, thrown over because of a stronger pull!
He had nothing to offer but failure. Nothing to offer Florence.
That was the name he thought. But under the thought was the death of a wild, rebel hope.
He lifted his eyes to see Florence on the step above him.