Ariel put down her cup suddenly. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “We want the address of Charlie’s studio. I forgot it.” They planned to look Mr. Frye up at his studio and invite him to lunch with them. His number might not be obtainable from the New York telephone book, so Hugh let Ariel run up to her room. He heard her humming on the stairs. His heart smote him a little. She was so gay, so expectant. An excursion to New York the cause! Why, he should have given her that excursion days ago,—and several of them! He heard her voice on the stairs but not her feet. Somehow that humming put him back five years, into the studio’s loggia, sitting there smoking with Gregory Clare, steeped in sunlight,—flower-light too, because the flowers in and around the Clare studio did give off light of their own. They were so still, Hugh and his friend, that butterflies crossed and recrossed close before their faces in their commerce with the flowers. It had been an adventure in friendship, and he, Hugh Weyman, had not lived up to the riches it offered him. He had failed. Since Ariel’s coming, and her and Grandam’s rescue of “Noon” from the attic, Hugh had realized poignantly how he had turned back at the very beginning of that adventure and let his friend go on alone with it. Gregory’s last letter to him had proved that he had gone on with it, only half aware that his friend was not abreast of him in the golden realm of imagination and love.
So it was from the Bermuda loggia that he was recalled by his mother surprisingly coming into the dining room at this unusual hour.
He jumped up and pulled a chair from the table for her. “I didn’t see you, Mother, or hear you.” He was almost abashed at the completeness of his day-dreaming.
“I’ve had the wretchedest night, Hugh. Hardly slept a wink. Miss Peters has thrown up her job, or Grandam has fired her. I can’t make out which. Anyway, she’s going this morning. She told me, quite casually, when I ran into her in the butler’s pantry last night. She was getting hot milk for Grandam. And she’s just told Ariel now. On the stairs.”
How her telling Ariel applied to the matter Hugh didn’t at the moment pause to consider or inquire. He said, reasonably, “Well, there’s always the agency. I’ll go there first thing—before lunch, anyway. But Miss Peters will have to stay on, of course, till we do get a good person. You told her that, I hope.”
“No. Don’t ring.” His mother stopped his hand that would have brought Rose. “Heaven knows I don’t want breakfast. Not now. Not till something’s settled. It’s too ridiculous, Hugh, but your grandmother hasn’t any intention that we shall replace Miss Peters for her. She has already engaged some one. I thought, possibly, you knew,—thought, in fact, you would know.”
“Why, no. But then that’s all right. Is the new person coming to-day?”
Mrs. Weyman replied dryly, “She’s here now. But she herself didn’t know her job began to-day,—not until Miss Peters told her. It’s Ariel.”
“Nonsense! Ariel’s just off to town with me. There’s her coat. Anyway,” as the significance of it all dawned on him, “it is nonsense.”
“I agree. But it seems that Ariel told Grandam she wanted a job, must have a job, and Grandam manufactured one for her. That’s the story. Rather unfair to Miss Peters, I think.”