Miss Osborne met him at the veranda steps. Indoors a mandolin and piano struck up the merry chords of The Eutaw Girl.
“My young sisters have company. We’ll sit here, if you don’t mind.”
She led the way to a quiet corner, and after they were seated she was silent a moment, while the light from the windows showed clearly that her perplexity of the morning was not yet at an end. The music tinkled softly, and a breeze swept in upon them with faint odours of the garden.
“I hope you won’t mind, Mr. Griswold, if I appear to be ashamed of you. It’s not a bit hospitable to keep you outside our threshold; but—you understand—I don’t have to tell you!”
“I understand perfectly, Miss Osborne!”
“It seems best not to let the others know just why you are here. I told my sisters that you were an old friend—of father’s—who wished to leave a message for him.”
“That will do first-rate!” he laughed. “My status is fixed. I know your father, but as for ourselves, we are not acquainted.”
He felt that she was seriously anxious and troubled, and he wished to hearten her if he could. The soft dusk of the faintly-lighted corner folded her in. Behind her the vines of the verandah moved slightly in the breeze. A thin, wayward shaft of light touched her hair, as though searching out the gold. When we say that people have atmosphere, we really mean that they possess indefinite qualities that awaken new moods in us, as by that magic through which an ignorant hand thrumming a harp’s strings may evoke some harmony denied to conscious skill. He heard whispered in his heart a man’s first word of the woman he is destined to love, in which he sets her apart—above and beyond all other womenkind; she is different; she is not like other women!
“It is nearly nine,” she said, her voice thrilling through him. “My father should have been here an hour ago. We have heard nothing from him. The newspapers have telephoned repeatedly to know his whereabouts. I have put them off by intimating that he is away on important public business, and that his purpose might be defeated if his exact whereabouts were known. I tried to intimate, without saying as much, that he was busy with the Appleweight case. One of the papers that has very bitterly antagonized father ever since his election has threatened to expose what the editor calls father’s relations with Appleweight. I cannot believe that there is anything wrong about that; of course there is not!”
She was controlling herself with an effort, and she broke off her declaration of confidence in her absent father sharply but with a sob in her voice.