By five o'clock in the morning she was already moving softly to and fro, so softly as not to rouse the sleeping Marrika. By seven her lightest bag was packed, herself was bathed, brushed, dressed even to hat and gloves, and standing at her window with all the listening alert look of one in a waiting-room expecting a train. She was watching for the city to begin to stir; watching for enough traffic below in the streets to make her own movement there not too noticeable. Yet every moment she waited she was in terror lest her fate should take violent form at last and assail her in the moment of escape. She listened for a foot ascending to her room with a message from Clara demanding an audience. She listened for the peal of the electric bell under Harry's hasty hand—Harry, arrived even at this unwarranted hour with Heaven knew what representative of law to force the sapphire from her.
But all her household was still unstirring when at last she went, soft step after step, down the broad and polished stair and across the empty hall. She went quiet, direct, determined, not at all as she had fled on her other perilous enterprise only yesterday. She shut the outer door after her without a sound and with great relief breathed in the fresh and faintly smoky air of morning.
She walked quickly. The windows of her house still overlooked her, and her greatest terror was that some voice, some appearance, out of that house, might command her return. The street was nearly empty. A maid scrubbing down steps looked after her sharply, and she wondered if she had been recognized. She had no intention of keeping to this street, or even taking a car and traveling down its broad, gray and gleaming vista of formal houses and formal gardens that she knew and that knew her so well. It was a cross-town car bound for quite another locality that she climbed aboard. It was filled only with mechanics and workmen with picks and shovels. She sat crowded elbow to elbow among odors of stale tobacco, stale garlic, stale perspiration, and looking straight before her through the car window watched the aspect of the city, still gray, grow less gleaming and formal and finally quite dirty, and quite, quite dull.
This was all as she had intended, very much in the direction of her errand, and safe. But in Market Street the car-line ended, and she was turned out again in this broad artery of commerce where she was in danger of meeting at any moment people she knew. She made straight across the thoroughfare to its south side, turned down Eighteenth and in a moment was hidden in Mission Street.
Now really the worst danger of detection was over. She saw no reason why a woman with a small hat and a hand-bag should not pass for a school-teacher. Indeed, the men did let her go at that, but the women—women with shawls over their heads, and women with uncovered heads and ear-rings in their ears, and thin, weak-eyed women with bags in their hands—the teachers themselves, one of whom she hoped to pass for—all stared at her. It didn't matter much, she thought, whether they thought her queer or not since they couldn't stop her.
She went, glancing at windows as she passed, looking for a place where she could go to breakfast. She turned into the first restaurant that offered, and after a hasty glance around it to be sure no one lurked there that might betray her she subsided into the clatter with relief. It was one more place to let time pass in, for it would be full two hours before she could fulfil her errand. She stayed as long as she dared, drinking two cups of the hideous coffee; stayed while many came and went, until she felt the proprietor noticing her. That revived her consciousness of the possible dangers still between her and the end she held in view. She had heard of people being arrested for suspicious conduct. She didn't feel sure in what this might consist, but surely such an appearance could be avoided by walking fast and seeming to know exactly where one was going.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, three hours since she had left her house and a most reasonable time of daylight, when Flora turned out of the flatness of "south of Market Street" and began to mount a slow-rising hill. It was a wooden sidewalk she followed flanking a wood-paved street, and these, with the wooden fences and dusty cypress hedges and the houses peering over them upon her looked worn, battered and belonging all to the past. None the less it bore traces of having been a dignified past, and farther up on the crown of the hill among deep-bosomed trees, two or three large mansions wore the gravely triumphant aspect of having been brought successfully from a past empire into a present with all their traditions and mahogany complete. Upward toward these Flora was looking. Her breath was short from fast climbing. Her cheeks under her thin veil were hot and bright.
As she neared the hilltop she glanced at a card from her chatelaine, consulting the address upon it. Then anxiously she scanned the house-fronts. It was not this one, nor this; but the square white mansion she came to now stood so far retired at the end of its lawn that she could not make out the number. As she peered a young girl came down the steps between the dark wings of the cypress hedge, a slim, fair, even-gaited creature dressed for the street and drawing on her gloves. As she passed Flora made sure she had seen her before. There was something familiar in the carriage of the girl's head and hands; something also like a pale reflection of another presence. Pale as it was, it was enough to reassure her that this was the house she wanted.
She ascended the steps beneath the arch of cypress and immediately found herself entering an atmosphere quieter even than that of the little street below. It was quiet with the quiet of protectedness, as if some one brooding, vigilant care encircled it, defending it against all inroads of violent action and thought. It had been long since any young girl had carried such a heart of passionate hopes and fears up this mossed path between these peaceful flower-beds.
This appearance of the place began to bring before Flora the full enormity and impertinence of her errand, but though her heart beat on her side as loud as the brass knocker upon the door, she had no mind for turning back.