With no attempt at salutation Peggy clapped her hands over her burning cheeks, and ran, yes, ignominiously ran, toward the house. At the door she met Mistress Huntoon. "Councillor Claiborne is—is—coming," she stammered breathlessly.
"Why didst thou not stay to speak with him?" But Peggy attempted no answer, only fled on indoors.
When Humphrey had been left alone, by Peggy's exit to the wharf and his wife's withdrawal to the offices, his thoughts turned with renewed irritation to Claiborne, till Christopher's entrance shed its usual benison of tranquillity. The glimpse of the ball which Neville had caught from over the stairway had lingered in his mind as a charming vision. The lights cheered him, and the music had lulled him to sweet slumber, from which he had wakened at peace with the world, yet with a haze of the Indian-summer sadness over the serenity.
After breakfast, Neville and Huntoon sat by the open door smoking their pipes in that social silence so dear to men, so difficult to women.
"Neville," said his host at length, breaking the long quiet, "you look better to-day than at any time since you came to Romney."
"Oh, I am well enough."
"Your tone hath somewhat of discouragement in it."
"I do feel a certain sadness of late, as if I were ever grasping for something I could not see, much less reach. It doth often seem to me that I and you and all of us here at Romney are shut out from the world by a wall of fog, not dark, because it is ofttimes flooded by sunlight, but heavy, dense, dull. It is like a thick curtain with vague distances in it, like the distances between the sun and the earth, and through these spaces float familiar scenes and faces, and all the while I feel that if I could grasp one word it would prove a clue to guide me through the spaces from one scene to another; but the word—a name, I think it is—will not come, and when I think on it too hard I seem to hear an echo murmuring 'Far away, far away.' Then the whole vision fades, and I come back to you and Mistress Huntoon and the rest; and yet it is as if only half of me came back, and half were still wandering through these vague, gray spaces of mist, following the name. Think you I shall ever find it?"
Touched to the quick, Huntoon opened his lips to speak. "Is the name—"
At that point his attention was caught by a stranger's voice outside the door saying, "I am surprised to see you abroad so early after last night's mighty merry dance, Mistress Huntoon."