“Yes. It’s what I can do best, I think. I am to enter the training-school the first of July, at the Larchmont Memorial Hospital.”
“I’ll wager tremendous odds you don’t,” thought Anthony, “in spite of that confident tone. If Roger Barnes looks in to-night it’s all up with your plans—or make a bigger fight than even you can do. A man who can’t stay in his own town because you are out of it——”
He was sitting—purposely—where he faced the road. He had considerately offered Rachel a chair with her back to the highway. Juliet was swinging lightly in the hammock behind the vines. Anthony, talking on about Arizona and the Larchmont Memorial, kept an eye on the approach to the house from the corner where visitors always left the car. His watch was rewarded at length by the sight of a figure rapidly turning the corner and making straight for the house.
“Now we’re in for it,” he thought. “From now on the question with Juliet and me will be how we can most gracefully efface ourselves without seeming to do it. If I remember this young person correctly she’s a little difficult to leave unchaperoned against her will.”
Out of the corner of his eye he kept track of the approaching figure. It was coming on at a great pace, and in the twilight could be seen looming taller and taller as it crossed the road and turned in across the lawn, making a short cut according to Barnes’s own fashion, so that the coming footsteps were noiseless, even to the moment when the figure reached the porch itself.
“Now for it,” thought Anthony, feeling as if the curtain were about to ascend on the fourth act of a play, when the third had ended amidst all possible excitement.
“I found the roses blooming just as they used to do, at the side of the house”—Rachel’s warm, contralto voice was answering a question from Juliet—“only so untended. I think I shall have to come out again before I begin my work, to look after them.”
Anthony did not turn as the step he had been watching for sounded upon the porch. To save his life he could not help keeping his eyes upon Rachel’s face. Rachel herself looked up with the air of the visitor who does not know the guests of the house, and the expression Anthony saw upon her face showed only the slightest possible surprise—certainly no other feeling.
Juliet rose. “Ah, Mr. Lockwood,” she said, with a cordiality, sincere little person though she was, Anthony knew for once she did not feel. “In the dusk I couldn’t be quite sure.”
Lockwood’s eyes instantly turned to Rachel. That he had known in some way whom he was to see was evident from a most unusual agitation in his manner.