And then they rang the bell at the vast, much-bestuccoed portal of the new house; and Anthony's heart, I think, for the minute stood still within him. The door was opened, and he could look into the big, ugly, familiar marble hall;—familiar still, and yet changed and strange, and even beautified; with new soft hangings, and Persian carpets, and flowers, and books, and bibelots about; with a new aspect of luxury and elegance; with a strange new atmosphere of feminine habitation, that went a little to Anthony's head, that called up clearer than ever the dark-haired, strenuous-faced woman of the dog-cart, and turned his imagination to visions and divinings of intimate feminine things. One thought of chiffons, and faint, elusive perfumes, and the gleam and rustle of silken garments; one heard soft voices, trills of feminine laughter, the whispering of feminine secrets; one saw ladies in low chairs, reading or embroidering by lamp-light.
So, for an instant, Anthony stood at Susanna's threshold, looking into her antechamber, breathless almost with his sense of her imminence;—and then the tall flunkey said, in the fastidious accents of flunkeydom, "Net et em, sir;" and all my hero's high-strung emotion must spend itself in the depositing of a card.
As they turned away, and the summer landscape again met him with its warm breath and radiant smile, he gloomed at it savagely, from eyes of deep rebuke, as at a thing that had beguiled him with false promises, wronged and defrauded him. And he flew out petulantly at poor Adrian—
"Here's a pretty dance you 've led me, for the pleasure of a word with
Mr. Yellowplush."
"Oh?" said Adrian, taken aback. "I expected you 'd be relieved. You did n't want to see them. And the exigencies of the case are satisfied by leaving cards."
"I could have sent my card by you," growled Anthony.
"You 've had a lovely walk, with a lovely comrade, in lovely weather," said Adrian.
"The weather is simply brazen," Anthony declared.
V
Judged by the standards of a cit, countrymen, I believe, are generally early risers; but even for a countryman, Anthony, next morning, rose at an unlikely hour. The tall clock in the hall, accenting with its slow sardonic tick the silence of the sleeping house, marked a quarter to five, as he undid the heavy old-fashioned fastenings of the door, the oaken bar, the iron bolts and chains, and let himself out.