“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.
The girl smiled and smoothed her red hair. “You may speak to mother if you like. It will do you no good. It will only make matters worse. After all, it concerns no one but ourselves.”
He shouted at her suddenly. “Please, will you go. Haven’t you done enough? There is no need to behave like a devil!”
The girl made no reply. She went out quietly, closing the door behind her, and made her way across the terrace to the rhododendrons where she knew she would find Irene. It was almost dark now and the glow from the furnaces below the hill had begun to turn the whole sky to a murky, glowing red. A locomotive whistled shrilly above the steady pounding of the roller mills. Through a gap in the dying hedge, the signal lights began to show, in festoons of jewels. The wind had turned and the soot and smoke were being swept toward Cypress Hill. It meant the end of the flowers. In the rare times when the wind blew from the south the blossoms were scorched and ruined by the gases.
Among the fireflies Lily hastened along the path to the rhododendrons. There, before the terra-cotta Virgin and Child, she found her sister praying earnestly. Lily knelt down and clasped the younger girl in her arms, speaking affectionately to her and pressing her warm cheek against Irene’s pale one.
IV
THAT night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly, and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.
At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and addressed him.
“It is your career, then, which is your first consideration,” she began. “It is that which you place above everything else ... above everything?”
For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.