“Yes?” queried Anne, smiling. “And for what?”
“I wasn’t,” confessed Muriel, “one bit ill when I wrote to you. I was only mentally sick because I wanted Tommy, and he had to go away on horrid business where I couldn’t accompany him—at least, he said I couldn’t; and that comes to the same thing—with Tommy.” Muriel heaved a prodigious sigh.
“Darling!” laughed Anne.
Muriel wrinkled her porcelain-like brows. “Oh, Anne, life is heavenly! There’s only just one long big beautiful moment with me and love and Tommy. But there are ten million years of purgatory to get through when he is away from me, and then I’m soul-sick. And I tell myself I’m a sentimental little fool, but it doesn’t do one bit of good. So I wrote to you to come to me till Patricia, who is a cheerful soul, can join me. And I didn’t want to tell you it was sheer silly loneliness, so I told you a little white lie,” she ended tragically.
“Of course,” said Anne serenely. “I knew.”
“Did you?” Muriel was half incredulous.
“Yes; your letter just breathed ‘I want Tommy’ all through it. And as a kind of postscript it added, ‘But you’re better than nothing to this poor moping person, so for Heaven’s sake come.’”
“And I,” murmured Muriel pathetically, “thought my letter the height of diplomatic lying.”
“On the contrary,” Anne assured her, “it was as transparent as a crystal bowl.”
For a few moments there was a silence. The [Pg 145]warm sun was pouring through the open window, falling across the bed and the slightly tumbled bedclothes, and glinting on the fair hair of the woman who lay among the pillows. Strictly speaking, Muriel Lancing was not beautiful, she was not even pretty. But there was an odd charm about her thin little face, her great grey-green eyes, and her wide mouth. She had a curious, almost elfin-like appearance. She was not at all unlike Arthur Rackham’s pictures of Undine as she lay there in some flimsy and diaphanous garment suggestive of sea-foam. Herself—her whole surroundings—held a suggestion of elusiveness, a kind of cobwebby grace and charm. Tommy—adored of Muriel—once said that the house was like an oyster-shell, rough and ugly on the outside, but inside all soft and shimmery with a pearl in it. It was his most brilliantly poetical effusion, and never likely to be surpassed by him. The only single thing in the room that struck an incongruous note was a large—a very large—photograph frame on a table by Muriel’s bed. It was a rough wooden frame, distinctly crooked, and with the glue showing somewhat in the corners. It held a [Pg 146]full-length photograph of an ugly, snub-nosed, but quite delightful-faced young man with a wide mouth and an appearance that rightly suggested red hair and freckles. This was the adored Tommy, and the frame was his own manufacture. Next to the man himself they were Muriel’s most treasured possessions.