“Something of your own?” But Miss Peters colored as she asked it. She hadn’t meant to be insulting to this guest of the Weymans about whom she knew nothing at all and had heard nothing,—since she was not on gossiping terms with the two servants. But “the old lady” was away, out driving with Glenn. It was very odd of Miss Clare, to say the least, to come prowling through the rooms in her absence. No one, not even Miss Anne and the two young men and their mother, ever came into the apartment uninvited.
Ariel realized Miss Peters’ perturbation. She said “No. It isn’t mine, the thing I hoped to find. And anyway, it’s not up here at all. It isn’t anywhere at Wild Acres. If it were at Wild Acres it would be here, though.”
“If I can help you—”
Ariel shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ll just go back.”
“You may use my door, then. You must have come through Mrs. Weyman’s whole apartment. This goes into the hall.”
Miss Peters was moving toward her door, expecting Ariel to take the hint. But Ariel was too abstracted to realize. “I’ll go back the way I came,” she murmured. And Miss Peters knew nothing to do about it.
But back in Grandam’s big room she decided to wait quietly up there for Grandam’s return from her outing. She was drawn to the daybed, with its wide view across woodlands to the Palisades. She sat down on the edge of the bed and absently gathered a scarf which was lying there up into her beauty-loving fingers. After a minute, she rose to her knees on the bed and wrapped the scarf about her. It was a silver wing, a silver cloud which draped her. One could dance in a scarf like this, even in the house. She wished that Persis and Nicky were here. She would dance for them, if they were, over the dark floor; she would feel that she was dancing, really, out in the golden snowy air, because of the magic of this scarf of Grandam’s. She began to hum,—low humming, with no tune in it. And she did not hear the door from the hall open and the quick step that followed. But she heard Mrs. Weyman’s voice when it came. Yet she did not start. One does not start out of such quiet happiness as had come to Ariel up here in Grandam’s environment. She looked up quietly into Mrs. Weyman’s astounded face.
“But, my dear! Has Mrs. Weyman returned?”
“No. Grandam is motoring with Glenn.” But such literalness was childish and Ariel knew it even as she spoke.
She hurried on, suddenly embarrassed. “I just came up to look for something. But it isn’t here. Then—the view—”