We sat behind the garage talking together for some little time, and I learned that her real name was Janet Player. She told me many things of Allport, always to his credit. She was loud in the ugly little fellow’s praises, and when I learned that he was married and the father of a family—I trust they took after the mother—I disguised my dislike, and apart from actually admitting him an Adonis, agreed to most of what she said.
The light was fading when we rose to go indoors. The sun had scorched its way across the sky and set, and now behind the house and over the northwest garden wall, the air was aglow with its last refracted golden rays. In the east the cathedral seemed to have advanced by half its distance, so clear did it stand with the paling green light behind it. Rooks were cawing their pleasing raucous lullaby among the neighboring trees. The thrushes were at even-song. The cedar stood out in dark but shadowless, enhanced relief against the dimming light. Did the quiet beauty of the scene make your heart beat a little faster too, Janet, I wondered, as we stood side by side at the top of the garden slope looking down at the old Georgian house with its wicked Borgian secret? This twilight half-hour, how even the ten thousand repetitions of experience fail to rob it of its mystery and subtle sense of calm bereavement! Day a-dying, night-engulfed. And were you wondering what the night might bring, Janet, as you stood like some slim gray wraith at my side? And did you vaguely guess that the man at your side—champion sob-stuff sentimentalist that he is—was all astir, quickened by the garden’s evening beauty, by your calm brave spirit, by the pity he felt for you fighting alone in this dangerous house, and that Cupid was fitting arrow to bow and preparing to shoot?
We were half-way down the slope, when she put her hand on my arm, and stood intent. “I thought I heard some one,” she whispered.
“Some one in the lane most likely.”
“No, no, it was quite near, a rustling of leaves, like some one brushing along against the hedge.”
We stood for a moment, her hand still on my arm, but not a sound disturbed the still air; there was no breath of wind to stir a leaf.
Janet shrugged her shoulders when I suggested that it might have been a cat, and that we had spoken so low that we could not have been overheard, and we walked across the lawn and went back into the house together.
We found Margaret, Kenneth, and Ralph sitting in the drawing-room.
“Ah! Here you are at last,” Margaret greeted us. “Isn’t the garden lovely in this light, Mrs. Kenley? Isn’t Ethel a lucky girl to have such a beautiful home?”
Ralph urged a game of bridge; there were five of us and Janet stood out, a letter to write, her excuse. At a little table near the open doorway we settled down to our game, Ralph partnering Margaret against Kenneth and myself. Margaret had the most astounding luck, and backed it with good play. Twice they made grand slam—rarely less than three tricks. They registered rubber after rubber.