HE awoke from a dream noisy with laughter and the ring of shod hoofs on a stone roadway; a phantasma in which faces were gray and distorted through smoke and people did wild things in sane ways. He lay long enough to separate the fiction of this dream from the actual but not more credible performances of the night before. Then he rose, yawning away the last of his drowsiness, and looked out over the roofs. He saw that it was late afternoon, for the shadows of the water butts ran well to the east. The mute solitude of the scene gave his loneliness a new pang. He felt more solitary in the multitude than he had ever felt in his unpeopled hills. Yet the place still lured him, not less than in days when he had hungered for it, a starved lover of life in the desert. If only he could find some one to come near, some one to whom he could be his unguarded self. Such a one must exist.
His eyes swept the reticent roofs, and his mind searched beneath them: what felicitous possibilities did they not conceal? People doubtless fasting like himself, longing for the friendly cry, eating their hearts out in loneliness—men and women he might know or never know. He lifted each roof as he gazed; under any one of them might be the companion; under all were charms of adventurous search.
In this moment of homesick longing his mind caught at Mrs. Laithe. She had told him to come soon. Did that mean in one day, or in ten? She was his one link with an old life that had filled if it did not satisfy. And sometimes she had met him. Chiefly she had been a woman for the eyes, but there had been fleeting times when they touched in ways that brought him a deeper satisfaction—times when invisible antennæ from each seemed to be in communicative contact. These moments brought back the palsy of shyness that had stricken him at his first glimpses of her; yet they brought, too, some potent, strange essence that sustained him. He resolved to go to her now. She mystified, she dismayed him, but her kindness was dependable.
It was the memory of this that moved him to throw off his stale, smoke-saturated garments, to bathe, to dress himself afresh, and to walk briskly through the tonic sharpness of a September afternoon.
As he rang the bell a vague, delightful home-coming warmth rushed over him.
"In a moment I shall see her," he said within himself. As the door swung back he heard the din of many voices and caught a rush of heated air, sweetish with the odor, as it seemed, of tired and fainting flowers. At the entrance to the drawing room he faltered, for the place was thronged with terrifying strange people who held teacups and talked explosively.
Longing to flee, he saw Mrs. Laithe across the room, turning somewhat wearily, he thought, away from three or four voluble women, as if to snatch at a moment of rest from her perfunctory smile. Almost instantly her eyes swung to his, and he became aware, as she started toward him, of some sudden flurry leaping behind their black-fringed curtains, a quick play of lights that stirred and confused him. She gave him her hand with half-formal phrases of greeting under which he detected a rising nervousness.
"So good of you to come, and on my day! They're tiresome at best. You are well? You shall have tea and know some people." She went to a table between the two rooms, where a girl in white drew tea from a samovar into many little cups. Ewing began to watch this girl, a slight but rounded creature with yellowish hair curving down either side of her tanned face. He caught a greenish light in her eyes, as she bent to her task with a somewhat anxious concentration.
Mrs. Laithe brought him the tea, which he helplessly took, and presented him to a vivid-hued young matron, who made room for him beside her. His part in the talk that followed was confined to mutterings of agreement, tinged now and then with a discreet sympathy. He heard the latest golf and yachting news and sprightly chat of the lady's newest motor car. He caught a blurred view of the Austrian Tyrol, and absorbed technical data on the operation of smuggling silk stockings from Paris. He gleaned that Airedales were difficult to raise; that Caruso would return; that all coachmen were but hirelings of the sales stables, when you got at the root of the trouble. He learned that Newport had been deadly, Bar Harbor impossible, Tuxedo not half bad for a week end; and that New York would be empty for another fortnight.
Upon none of these difficult matters had he anything of moment to offer. The assertion that New York was empty bereft him, indeed, of even his slender power of assent. The lady would have considered him stupid but for the look with which he met her quick eyes from time to time. She decided that he was merely bored—a thing not to be particularly remarked. It was common enough in the men she met.