The sun was shining,—windy, gold afternoon sunlight. They all went out under the portico together to watch Grandam and Glenn off, in Hugh’s roadster. Anne’s arm was linked carelessly in Ariel’s. As they turned back into the hall Enderly cried—now that Grandam was out of hearing, he was the brash young novelist again—“But she’s magnificent, that woman. Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t have managed it any better! (He meant old age, of course.) Some one should have prepared me for her beauty, though. Once she must have been almost too beautiful.”
“Her hair’s always been like that, pure silver ever since I remember,” Anne told him. And Mrs. Weyman enlarged upon it. “Ever since Anne’s grandfather died, a few days after Anne’s father was born, it’s been gray. Grandam was young then, hardly twenty. It happened as it happens in romances but never supposedly in real life. Her hair went white in a night.”
“Silver,” Enderly corrected. “There’s nothing white about it. It’s silver, like bubbles in the sun. Not silver like Ariel’s. Ariel, you’ve got queer hair. But it’s nice. It’s the color of copper wire to-day. What turned your hair?”
Ariel laughed, and her fairy-tale eyes squinted to green slits with merriment. She laughed with them all. She could have danced. Was she going to be really happy again? Was happiness a wave, buoying up the whole of her life, a wave that wouldn’t be kept out, that would flood and make a freshet of her heart—even with her father dead? And buried? Oh, but he was buried in the wave, not in the earth. That was the secret.
She started up to her room to get her coat. She would get out quickly. With the sun shining like this, Persis and Nicky must be somewhere near their playground. She would find them. She couldn’t help finding them, now when she was so happy.
But she did not open the door to her room. With her hand on the knob, it came to her: of course Grandam had “Noon.” It was hanging all this time in her attic apartment. Hugh adored Grandam, and he would never be so selfish as not to insist that she have the picture up there, where she lived so constantly alone. How dull Ariel had been not to have guessed sooner! But no wonder she had looked up at those windows from the woods day after day with a sense that there was relief from loneliness if she could only reach up to it. “Noon” had been there, with Grandam, waiting for her all the while. The beach. The sunlight. The green water. And Gregory Clare’s love of his daughter made visible, dancing. That is what herself in her father’s paintings meant to Ariel,—not a picture of herself, but a picture of his love for her. She saw herself no more when she looked at his painting than she saw herself when she looked into his eyes.
But must she wait until Grandam and Glenn get back from their drive to go up and make sure that, after all her disappointments, “Noon” was there, safe with Grandam? Miss Peters would let her in.
She had forgotten that Grandam’s first words to her at luncheon had been “They tell me that your father was a painter.” “Noon” would have made that speech impossible, if Grandam had the picture. But their flight together into understanding had followed that opening too swiftly for Ariel to remember it now.
How did one get to the attic? Were there stairs? She had heard mention of an elevator. But she wouldn’t know how to run an elevator. There must be stairs as well. She hurried away to look.