“I hope I’m not hurrying you!” Joan and Ariel turned in surprise toward the unexpected voice. Prescott Enderly had come in soundlessly, and was just at Ariel’s elbow.
Joan exclaimed, “But how did you get here like this, unannounced? I’m not at home. Where’s Parks? And what are you doing away from college?”
“One word answers them all,” Enderly replied. “Spring! Parks must be out somewhere watching the tulips grow. Anyway, the door was unguarded. In the spring nothing goes according to pattern, even your housekeeping, Joan.”
Joan gave him her hand. He had nodded at Ariel and she at him. Ariel was seeing him as the person who had caused Anne all that anguish. His sea-blue eyes, crinkled now with a forced smile, the lines in his cheeks that just escaped being dimples and gave sympathy to his face, his eager sensitive body, his full, sensuous but sensitive lips,—these she was seeing with Anne’s eyes. But he was shockingly white. The man was simply beside himself, she felt, with some deep emotion.
Joan was a bit short with him. “I wasn’t meaning to see any one to-day,” she said. “I’m even dining alone to-night. But yes—you may stay. You’ve come so far. I’d rather you called first on the telephone, however. Surprises always put me off a little. Do they you, Ariel? Some people they do.”
“Joan, you are wonderful not to turn me out. But I’d have come, even if there was only one chance in ten thousand of your seeing me. If I’d called on the telephone, there wasn’t even that chance, I felt. You are a saint to put up with me.”
They seemed hardly aware when Ariel said her polite say about the tea Joan had given her and departed. She might have used the window after all and no one noticed. From the door she glanced back and saw them on the sofa, Enderly bent forward, holding both of Mrs. Nevin’s hands in his, his eyes blue sea fire, his face still paper white. Neither of them was speaking.
In her short cut home through the woods, no white and yellow violets gave to Ariel’s eyes or feet a path into faërie. She had lost faërie for that day, lost it to quite a bewildering degree.
Chapter XXII
The morning of the Gregory Clare exhibition Hugh was waked by the clangor of birds in Wild Acres woods. The window by Hugh’s bed held the view like a picture frame. Sleepily, he thought it a pity they couldn’t hang this in the exhibition. It was quite in the Gregory Clare manner. But something was missing from it. The painter’s daughter. Where would he, Hugh, put her, if he were the painter? There at the right, where the sunlight was silvery in the tops of the giant beech, her head not quite level with the highest branch, standing still on the breathless, silvery-green-gold air.