She turned in at the low gate of imitation grill in front of an enormous wooden mansion, with towers and cupolas painted all a chill slate gray, with fuchsias, purple and red, clambering up the front. She rang, and was admitted into a hall, ornate and very high, with a wide staircase sweeping down into the middle of it.
The maid looked dubiously at Flora and thought Miss Buller was not at home, but would see. Flora turned into the room on her left and sat down among the Louis Quinze sofas and potted palms with a feeling that Miss Buller was at home, and, for one reason or another, preferred not to be seen. She waited apprehensively, wondering whether Ella was not seeing the world-in-general, or had really specified against herself. Could it be that Ella was one of those women whom Harry had alluded to as running after Kerr? In the short twenty-four hours every individual help she had counted upon had seemed to draw away from her—Kerr, whose understanding she had been so sure of; Clara, whose propriety had never failed; Harry, whose comfortable good nature she had so taken for granted! It seemed as if the sapphire, whose presence she was never unconscious of, for all she wore it out of sight, had a power like the evil eye over these people. But if it could turn such as Ella against her, why, the Brussels carpet beneath her might well open and let her down to deeper abysses than Judge Buller's wine-cellar.
She started nervously at the step of the maid returning. The message brought was unexpected. "Miss Buller says will you please walk up-stairs?"
Flora was amazed. That invitation would have been odd enough at any time, for she and Ella were hardly on such intimate footing. But now she was ushered up the majestic stair, and from the majestic upper hall abruptly into a wild little cluttered sewing-room, and thence into a wilder but more spacious bedroom, large curtains at the windows, large roses on the carpet, and over all objects in the room a clutter of miscellaneous articles, as if Ella's band-boxes, bureaus, and work-baskets habitually refused to contain themselves.
From the midst of this Ella confronted her, still in her "wrapper" and with the large puff of her hair a little awry. Under it her face was curiously pink, a color deepening to the tip of her nose and puffing out under her eyes.
"Well, Flora," she greeted her guest. "You were just the person I wanted to see. Sit down. No, not there—that's my bird of paradise feather! Oh, no, not there—that's the breakfast. Well, I guess you'll have to sit on the bed."
Flora swept aside the clothes that streamed across it and throned herself on the edge of the high, white plateau of Ella's four-poster. Ella, for all her eager greeting, looked upon her friend doubtfully, and Flora recognized in herself a similar hesitation, as if each were trying to make out, without asking, what thoughts the other harbored.
"I was afraid I shouldn't see you at all," Flora began at last.
"Well, you wouldn't if it hadn't happened to be you," said Ella paradoxically. "Look at me; did you ever see such a sight?"
"You don't look very well," Flora cautiously admitted. "Why, Ella, you've been crying!"