In the room adjoining she could hear her maid quietly moving about, tidying up, with presently a chirrup of the telephone, then a guarded mumble as the woman answered.
She was hanging up when Lucinda, dragging on a négligé, flung open the communicating door.
The maid said Mr. Zinn had called up, and gaped to see Lucinda's glance grow dull and the spirit of her entrance pass abruptly into apathy.
Sinking wearily against the door-frame, she desired to know what Zinn had wanted.
"He asked if you was up yet, ma'm, and when I told him no, he said it didn't matter, would I kindly take the message, he couldn't keep his date with you to look at the rushes today, and maybe not tomorrow, he'd give you a ring 'safternoon and let you know."
"Very well," Lucinda said without interest.... "I'll have my bath, please."
Waiting for the water to be drawn, she wandered to a window. The high fog still held the day against the sun, a dense, cold pall of grey, as flat as a metal plate, closing out the blue, closing in an atmosphere lifeless and bleak.
She thought of Lynn fighting for his life, perhaps losing, perhaps already still in defeat.
And Nelly ... at whose fate one could only guess....
She recalled that bright hour of sunset, so clear and warm, through which she had motored in gladness toward his arms whom she had called her beloved, that hour in the dread light of this so weirdly unreal, so inconceivably remote; and the old, embittered plaint of Abdu-el-Yezdi found a melancholy echo in her heart: