Lee Randon was startled to find the brightness of morning penetrating his eyes; ready for his bath, with the percolator choking and bubbling in the next room, he rehearsed, reaffirmed, all that he had decided the night before. No one was with him at the breakfast table elaborate with repousse silver and embroidered linen and iced fruit; but, returning upstairs, he saw Savina in her biscuit-colored suit in the library. “William had to go to Washington,” she told him; “he left his regrets.” She was, Lee perceived, almost haggard, with restless hands; but she didn't avoid his gaze. She stood by the table, one hand, gloved, slightly behind her on it. Bending forward he kissed her more intently, more passionately, more wholly, than ever before.
“I hadn't meant to do that,” he said; but his speech was only mechanical, as though, when he had once made it up, it discharged itself, in a condition where it was no longer valid, in spite of him. Savina replied with a silent smile. Her drawn appearance had gone; she was animated, sparkling, with vitality; even her body seemed fuller.
“We shall have a long unbroken day together,” she told him; “I have to go out for an hour, and then it will begin, here, I think, with lunch.”
“I ought to be back in Eastlake,” he confessed.
“Don't think of that till it comes. Eastlake has had you a long time, compared with a day. But there are days and days.” They kissed each other. “I'll go now.” She kissed Lee. “Lunch will be at two.” He kissed her. He didn't leave the library until a maid announced that lunch was ready and the fact of her return. At the table they spoke but little; Lee Randon was enveloped in a luxurious feeling—where Savina was concerned—of security; there was no need to hurry; the day lengthened out into the night and an infinity of happy minutes and opportunities. They discussed, however, what to do with it.
“I'd like to go out to dinner,” she decided; “and then a theatre, but nothing more serious than a spectacle: any one of the Follies. I am sick of Carnegie Hall and pianists and William's solemn box at the Opera; and afterwards we'll go back to that café and drink champagne and dance.”
That, he declared, with a small inner sinking at the thought of Fanny, would be splendid. “And this afternoon—?”
“We'll be together.”
They returned to the library—more secluded from servants and callers than the rooms on the lower floor—where, at one end of the massive lounge, they smoked and Savina talked. “I hardly went to sleep at all,” she admitted; “I thought of you every second. Do you think your wife would like me?” She asked the vain question which no woman in her situation seemed able to avoid.