“Hello, Hugh! You’re welcome. For I’ve as much to tell you this time as you can possibly have to tell me. And I’m going to have first turn. No, not the edge of my bed, please, Hugh! How many times have I got to tell you I simply won’t have it? It spoils the mattress. Ariel’s the only one I’ll allow. She can’t weigh enough to really hurt—”
“Ariel!”
“Yes, Ariel. Who else? Why did you keep her hidden, Hugh? From me, I mean. It’s Ariel I want to talk about, as I haven’t wanted to talk,—for years!”
As Grandam repeated the name, it came to Hugh that Ariel, while hardly in his mind concretely at all during the week of his absence, had never actually been very far away from it. She had, to his mental preoccupations, something of the relation she had to the central theme of her father’s paintings. She did not get mixed up with the works, but she was there all the same, hovering on the edges,—definite and vital. A girl with March sunshine squinting her green eyes into Chinesy slits under the brim of a green hat. A girl with a friendly, pointed-cornered mouth. A girl in a white coat, looking like a fairy-tale princess..., too.
As it happened, the visit to Grandam prolonged itself rather unreasonably. Hugh realized that he had stayed longer than he had meant to or perhaps than he should, considering Joan’s optical invitation to the dance. But he did not take out his watch as he finally went down, and so he was not aware that more than an hour had flown away, while he and Grandam talked of Ariel.
And then, at the head of the second flight of stairs he was halted by a laugh, which reached him, like a finger of light, through the blare of the jazz. It came from the wing where the guest rooms were. Curiosity drew him in that direction a few steps. Then he heard it again. Two of the doors in the guest wing were shut, but one stood open upon darkness. That was the room Ariel was occupying. As he paused, puzzled by this strange phenomenon of a girl laughing to herself in the dark, Glenn’s voice impinged on the laugh. Just a word or two, and then Glenn, too, laughed. Hugh strode to the door.
The light from the hall penetrated the room enough to show him his brother lying on his elbow across the foot of Ariel’s bed, and the dim figure of Ariel herself, sitting up against the pillows, the eiderdown drawn up to her chin like a tent. The windows were open and the little room was fresh with snowy airiness. Hugh went in. “I say, Glenn, what are you doing here?” He spoke evenly enough but his voice was displeased.
“Hello! You back?” Glenn leaned higher on his elbow. “I’m here entertaining Ariel. You asked me to look out for her when I put you on your train, and I’ve been doing my duty ever since. You ought to be gratified to find me at it.”
“It must be late. You’d better be at your dance, hadn’t you? And isn’t this getting the house cold?”
“Fresh air is the best thing that could happen to this house,” Glenn responded cryptically. “But if you think Joan may catch cold, shut the door. We don’t mind, do we Ariel?”