"You thought, Justine, that I would see her." There was unmistakable irony in her voice. "Very well. . . . Show her in."
She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden, smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold. She chanced to look down at them. A strange memory came to her: words that she had heard Roscoe read in church. The thing was almost grotesque in its association. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!"
Ruth Devlin entered, saying, "I have come, to ask you if you will dine with us next Monday evening?"
Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: "You see, though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;" and she added as neutrally and as lightly as she could—"Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion have been good enough to say that they will come. Of course, a dinner party as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can—with the help of our friends."
Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for. At last she said, in the course of the formal talk: "You have travelled much?"
"Yes, that has been my lot," was the reply; and she leaned back in the gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.
"I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean," said Ruth, "but here I remain—what shall I say?—a rustic in a bandbox, seeing the world through a pin-hole. That is the way my father puts it. Except, of course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of companions."
Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively. The notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their talk, varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet in singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words. It was almost sardonic in its monotonous persistence.
"Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin," was the indolent reply. "Perhaps the simpler life is the happier. The bandbox is not the worst that may come to one—when one is born to it. I am not sure but it is the best. I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the world, the bandbox is permanently habitable again."
Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.