"Coom in!" cried a Scotchy voice from the basement. So I stepped across the tessellated floor of the hall into the broad drawing-room and stared out through the long French doors of the glass room at the green smudge of Battery Park beyond the river. There wasn't a soul in sight in any of the rooms and yet I felt as if some one was there. Perhaps it was just that I was awed by the disconcerting loveliness of the portrait of the brunette lady that hung in a tarnished oval frame above the drawing-room mantel. I looked at her and waited. Presently I coughed apologetically.
"Could I please find out if a—er—Miss Day lives here? Or—if anybody here knows her?"
The Scotchy voice lifted itself grudgingly above the vigorous swish of a scrubbing brush.
"I dinna think ony one's home but th' Sculptor Girl—she's on th' top floor an' it's not I that knows whether she's in a speaking humor, but you're weelcoom to try her—"
It was raining, a miserable spring drizzle, yet the spacious hall seemed flooded with sunlight. There's an oval skylight fitted with amber glass; silhouetted against its leaded rims are outlined flying birds.
"Hark, hark! The lark at heaven's gate sings!" I read beneath the margins when I looked up to find the sunlight. I knew that I ought to feel like an impertinent intruder but I just couldn't! And I defy any one to go up those wonderful circling stairs and not smile! For at the head of each flight of steps is a recessed niche such as used to be built to hold statuary and in the one near the second floor is a flat vase filled with flowers—little saffron rosebuds the day I passed by —with an ever so discreet card engraved in sizable old English script that hinted:
"One's for you."
I was still sniffing at my buttonhole when I reached the second niche.
There was a black varnished wicker tray heaped with fruit and a
Brittany platter filled with raison cookies.
"Aren't you hungry?" the card above them suggested. I nibbled an apricot all the way up the third flight and almost laughed aloud when I reached the top, though of course I was expecting something. There's a yellow glazed vase there,
"For pits and stones
Or skins and bones"