"Very well," she said at length, and her voice was coldly conventional. "If you have finished your repairs, will you drive me to Mrs. Van Valkenberg's? Follow this road through; turn to your left, and I 'll tell you when to stop."
Sara Van Valkenberg was one of the most popular of the younger matrons of Newport and New York. As Sara Malalieu, daughter of a prime old family, Billy Van Valkenberg had discovered her, and their wedding had been an event from which many good people in her native city dated things. Van Valkenberg was immensely wealthy and immensely wicked. Sara had not sounded the black depths of his character when he was killed in a drunken automobile ride two years before, but she had learned enough to appreciate the kindness of an intervening fate.
Now she lived in an Elizabethan cottage sequestered among the rocks a short distance inland from the Ocean Drive. She was very good to look at, very worldly wise, and very, very popular. She was thirty years old, an age not to be despised in a woman.
When Miss Wellington's car arrived at the cottage, Tommy Osgood's motor was in front of the door, which was but a few feet from the road. With an expression of annoyance, Anne ran up the steps and rang the bell. The footman was about to take her card when Mrs. Van Valkenberg's voice sounded from the library.
"Come in, Anne, we saw you coming."
Anne entered the apartment and found her friend reclining in all her supple ease, watching flushed-face Tommy, who had been attempting to summon his nerve to tell her how little he cared to continue his course through the world without her, which was just what she did not wish to have him do, because Tommy was a manly, likable, unassuming chap and had much yet to learn, being several years her junior.
"Oh, Tommy," said Anne, "I wanted to speak to Sara alone for a moment."
"Tommy was on his way to the polo field," said Mrs. Van Valkenberg, suggestively. "Now he need have no further excuse for being civil to an old lady."
"By George," said Tommy, "that's so, I must be on my way." And he went, not without some confusion.
Sara watched him through the window as he walked to his car.