He watched the bubbles in his glass dreamily, holding it up in his slim well-kept fingers.
“Tell me something of your own immediate present and future,” he said.
I made the story of my Grandfather Glenarm’s legacy as brief as possible, for brevity was a definite law of our intercourse.
“A year, you say, with nothing to do but fold your hands and wait. It doesn’t sound awfully attractive to me. I’d rather do without the money.”
“But I intend to do some work. I owe it to my grandfather’s memory to make good, if there’s any good in me.”
“The sentiment is worthy of you, Glenarm,” he said mockingly. “What do you see—a ghost?”
I must have started slightly at espying suddenly Arthur Pickering not twenty feet away. A party of half a dozen or more had risen, and Pickering and a girl were detached from the others for a moment.
She was young,—quite the youngest in the group about Pickering’s table. A certain girlishness of height and outline may have been emphasized by her juxtaposition to Pickering’s heavy figure. She was in black, with white showing at neck and wrists,—a somber contrast to the other women of the party, who were arrayed with a degree of splendor. She had dropped her fan, and Pickering stooped to pick it up. In the second that she waited she turned carelessly toward me, and our eyes met for an instant. Very likely she was Pickering’s sister, and I tried to reconstruct his family, which I had known in my youth; but I could not place her. As she walked out before him my eyes followed her,—the erect figure, free and graceful, but with a charming dignity and poise, and the gold of her fair hair glinting under her black toque.
Her eyes, as she turned them full upon me, were the saddest, loveliest eyes I had ever seen, and even in that brilliant, crowded room I felt their spell. They were fixed in my memory indelibly,—mournful, dreamy and wistful. In my absorption I forgot Larry.
“You’re taking unfair advantage,” he observed quietly. “Friends of yours?”