But even so she remarked, “It’s funny, but do you know, I don’t believe Clare knows you’ve been away any more than we did. Petra couldn’t have told them. And what’s still more inexplicable, Petra has gotten home late every evening and hardly has time to dress for dinner. Clare rather implied that you were overworking her, keeping her such unconscionable hours! And all the time you haven’t been there at all!”
Lewis’ eyelids just flickered but he gave no other sign. He had told Miss Frazier by telephone this morning that he would take an afternoon train and be at the office at the usual time to-morrow morning. But Mrs. Duffield had persuaded him to fly instead, and that swift and luxurious way of travel had brought him to Boston late this afternoon. He had dropped around at the office and found Miss Frazier still there. She had sent Petra home early, she said, because of the heat; and the other afternoons she had let Petra catch the three-forty express for Meadowbrook, thinking there was so little need for two of them with the doctor away.—What was the mystery? Why need Petra be so devious, Lewis asked himself. But he was glad he had been warned. Very glad. He might so easily have betrayed her to-night, later, at Green Doors.
It was dark when Lewis drove up the Green Doors road and recognized Dick’s car standing before the door. He was taken to the library, after having sent in his name and been left waiting a minute or two in the hall. The maid who had admitted him had seemed none too sure that any one was at home. He realized the reason for her caution when he saw what his visit was interrupting. Lowell Farwell was reading aloud from his own manuscript. Clare was picturesquely erect in a corner of the divan, working on a brilliant square of needlepoint. Dick lounged and smoked a briar pipe beside her, looking rather romantic, young and very handsome. The author himself sat facing them, his hands full of canary-colored scratch paper.—Lewis was, had he known it, the sole person who would have been allowed to interrupt the reading.
He was welcomed warmly. Clare’s inward smile indeed was as brilliant, as warm, as that on her lips and in her eyes. So soon! She had given Doctor Pryne two or three weeks before he would allow himself to return—and here he was back within the week! Doctor Lewis Pryne! The inaccessible! The unobtainable! It was more than gratifying. It was—exciting and delightful....
“Too bad Petra isn’t at home,” she said at once. “She won’t like missing you. But she said there was extra work to-night and she would have supper somewhere with Miss Frazier and then get back to it. I thought you must be there in person, cracking the slave whip, Doctor. Awfully nice to have you here instead!”
This time, because he was prepared, Lewis did not so much as blink. “No, it wasn’t necessary for me to stay. But I am interrupting. You shouldn’t have been ‘at home.’”
Lowell Farwell was putting away the manuscript. “Nothing of the kind,” he exclaimed. “I can read to Clare any time. Dick came to play with Petra and I did the ancient mariner turn with him; so he won’t mind my stopping. It isn’t every day I get a chance to talk with a genuine psychologist. If I hadn’t gone in for writing, Doctor Pryne, I should be in your field. Do you, by the way, read Dostoevsky? The Russians know a thing or two. They aren’t afraid of turning to the findings of morbid psychology for suggestion, at least, in their studies of human character....”
It was sometime after ten when Petra let herself softly in at the front door. The library door had been left open after Lewis’ interruption of the reading and she heard voices. Dick’s. Her father’s. If Lewis had happened to speak as she crossed the hall, she would never have gone on and in. She would have stolen away to bed and sent a maid to tell Clare she was at home. It was too late to retreat when she saw Lewis. Her face hardened as she came forward. So Clare had won. They had not known at the office—she and Miss Frazier—that Doctor Pryne had even returned, and yet here he was the first hour he was back, sitting beside her stepmother, helping her wind up a ball of yarn. But it was stupid to be so surprised. Hadn’t she known ever since Saturday evening that Clare had Doctor Pryne in tow! If it were not so, he would never have betrayed Petra’s confidences to her as he had done.
Clare entranced every one, of course,—except Petra herself. But Saturday afternoon, when Doctor Pryne had walked with Petra across to the guest-house piazza and sat there, listening to the bobolink, and Petra had been moved to be herself with him, and even to talk about Teresa, she had thought that Doctor Pryne would be the one exception to the general rule. He would be her friend—Petra’s—not Clare’s. He would see through Clare. He belonged to herself and Teresa. That meeting, long ago in the Cambridge apartment, had made him belong. Or rather they had been deceived—and thought so. Where had the idea come from, anyway? Teresa had been as illusioned as Petra herself. And when he held her chair for her at Clare’s tea table—and even more, while she sat silent beside him, and could not make herself eat or drink because it was so wonderful that he had come at last—Petra had known that he understood her and was close to her in some indefinable but real way. She had known but she had known a lie. It was an illusion brought away out of childhood; and she had been enticed from her secret fastness by it, the fastness where she hid from Clare and all of the life here at Green Doors.
Doctor Pryne was holding a chair for her at this minute as he had held the chair under the elm. The same look was on his face. If she did not watch out, she would be betrayed by it into sincerity again, into being simply herself.