She felt besieged by happiness from every side. Involuntarily she looked into the actualities of her life for escape. There were avenues enough there, leading back into loneliness, self-distrusts and that wide, wide avenue ending at a grave and her grief. But strangely, they closed and shut her out when she would have entered them. The black trees, the clear-smelling snow, and all those hidden wings and joys of spring were opening to her, and grief was shut.
As she bathed and dressed, she remembered with wonder the mood in which she had gone to bed. She had been lonely and dazed. Too heartsick even to cry, she had said her prayers lying on her face in bed, without caring enough to kneel. And then, her mind blunted by misery, she had fallen on sleep,—as Samurai in Japanese prints fall on their swords.
She brushed at her hair until it glimmered to silver and every curl had a separate life. She knew that her hair was lovely. Her father had never tired of praising it and painting it. Ash-colored in some lights, it was silvery in others, palest gold in others. Sometimes it seemed the absorption of light itself. And it curled in close, soft curls at her neck. That blond hair, and her grace of movement, were her claims to beauty. But at the minute she was seeing her narrow green eyes in the mirror, and her thin, pale mouth with its pointed corners. She knew that the Weymans must think her plain, but to-day she would not be bothered even to care.
The house was very still. Not a sound. Hugh was at his place at the dining table, reading the Tribune while he waited for Rose to bring his coffee.
He looked his surprise. “Hello, Ariel! But we should have told you. The family doesn’t breakfast until eight-thirty. It isn’t eight yet. I’m catching the eight-fifteen express to town, and I usually do grab breakfast like this alone. It’s a twenty minutes’ walk to the station.”
He was holding out her chair. She took it quickly so that he might begin the breakfast which Rose was arranging at his place. “I thought you drove to New York,” she said. “Don’t you usually?”
“Often, but not usually. Not when Glenn and Anne are at home. It’s convenient for them to have the car. Well, Rose, what are you going to scare up for Miss Clare? She mustn’t wait for the others.”
“May I just have some coffee, and one of those rolls, and walk to the station with you? I should like that so much, if you don’t mind. I won’t talk and disturb the morning. But I want to get out into the snow and the woods.”
“Of course you do. But why not talk? You won’t ‘disturb the morning’ any more than the sunshine or the snow does. You’re that kind of a person.” He did not feel that he was talking nonsense. The Bermuda Ariel was here this morning, back after five years.
But in spite of Hugh’s reassurance, Ariel stuck to her bargain and did not talk, during all their long walk out the path which Hugh’s previous solitary morning walks had made in the snow through the woods and across wide fields, and finally down to the big road and the little station. She was so silent, and her feet went so stilly before or behind his, just as it happened, that she actually intruded no more on his consciousness, after the first two or three minutes, than the March sunshine, which was wreathing the landscape in golden scarfs of light. Nor was he thinking of the coming busy day in his Wall Street office. The unexpectedness of Joan Nevin’s return yesterday from her winter months on the Riviera and in Bermuda had broken down his recently so carefully built up resistance to her obsession of his mind. She had swarmed back into possession, as it were, and taken him captive. The same old tune was on again, jangling his nerves and partially stupefying his intellect.