“I might have known,” she murmured, “that this was your plan.”
“No,” he replied, with a smile that brought to his face a rare kindliness and sweetness, “it wasn’t mine; I’m merely an inefficient agent. It’s all born of things hoped for—”
He waved his hand to the bare walls, brought it round and placed something in her palm.
“There’s the key to my house of dreams. As you see, it needs people—its own people—Marjorie and you, for example, to make it home again. I shall be much happier to know you’re back....”
ELIZABETH!
He was gone and she gazed after him with a deepened sense of unreality. A moment later she heard Marjorie calling to him in the garden.
She stood staring at the flat bit of metal he had left in her hand, the key of his house of dreams; then she laid her arms upon the long shelf of the mantel and wept. The sound of her sobbing filled the room. Never before—not when the anger and shame of her troubles were fresh upon her—had she been so shaken.
She was still there, with her head bowed upon her arms, when a voice spoke her name, “Elizabeth,” and “Elizabeth,” again, very softly.