His smile was more of an effort than hers. "Thanks. My grandfather has expressed the same hope. He says the affair will not be complete without my presence at the feast. To-morrow, at this hour, I shall come to see Anne. Thank you, Rawson."
CHAPTER II
His gaze swept the long, luxurious drawing-room, now filled with the shadows of late afternoon. A sigh that ended in an unvoiced imprecation escaped him. There was not an object in the room that did not possess for him a peculiar claim of intimacy. Here he had dreamed of paradise with Anne, and here he had built upon his hopes,—a staunch future that demanded little of the imagination. He could never forget this room and all that it had held for him.
But now, in that brief, swift glance, he found himself estimating the cost of all the treasures that it contained, and the price that was to be paid in order that they might not be threatened. These things represented greed. They had always represented greed. They had been saved out of the wreck that befell the Tresslyn fortunes when Anne was a young girl entering her teens, the wreck that destroyed Arthur Tresslyn and left his widow with barely enough to sustain herself and children through the years that intervened between the then and the now.
He recalled that after the wreck had been cleared up, Mrs. Tresslyn had a paltry twenty-five thousand a year on which to maintain the house that, fortuitously, had been in her name at the time of the smash. A paltry sum indeed! Barely enough to feed and clothe one hundred less exacting families for a year; families, however, with wheelbarrows instead of automobiles, and with children instead of servants.
Ten years had elapsed since the death of Arthur Tresslyn, and still the house in the east Seventies held itself above water by means of that meagre two thousand a month! These rare, almost priceless objects upon which he now gazed had weathered the storm, proof against the temptations that beset an owner embarrassed by their richness; they had maintained a smug relationship to harmony in spite of the jangling of discordant instruments, such as writs and attachments and the wails of insufferable creditors who made the usual mistake of thinking that a man's home is his castle and therefore an object of reprisal. The splendid porcelains, the incomparable tapestries and the small but exquisite paintings remained where they had been placed by the amiable but futile Arthur, and all the king's men and all the king's horses could not have removed them without Mrs. Tresslyn's sanction. The mistress of the house subsisted as best she could on the pitiful income from a sequestered half-million, and lived in splendour among objects that deluded even the richest and most arrogant of her friends into believing that nothing was more remote from her understanding than the word poverty, or the equally disgusting word thrift.
Here he had come to children's parties in days when he was a lad and Anne a child of twelve, and here he had always been a welcome visitor and playmate, even to the end of his college years. The motherless, fatherless grandson of old Templeton Thorpe was cherished among heirlooms that never had had a price put upon them. Of all the boys who came to the Tresslyn house, young Braden Thorpe was the heir with the most potent possibility. He did not know it then, but now he knew that on the occasion of his smashing a magnificent porcelain vase the forgiving kiss that Mrs. Tresslyn bestowed upon his flaming cheek was not due to pity but to farsightedness. Somehow he now felt that he could smash every fragile and inanimate thing in sight, and still escape the kiss.
Not the least regal and imposing object in the room was the woman who stood beside the fireplace, smiling as she always smiled when a situation was at its worst and she at her best. Her high-bred, aristocratic face was as insensitive to an inward softness as a chiseled block of marble is to the eye that gazes upon it in rapt admiration. She had trained herself to smile in the face of the disagreeable; she had acquired the art of tranquillity. This long anticipated interview with her daughter's cast-off, bewildered lover was inevitable. They had known that he would come, insistent. She had not kept him waiting. When he came to the house the day after his arrival from England, following close upon a cablegram sent the day after the news of Anne's defection had struck him like a thunderbolt, she was ready to receive him.