Smile on, nor venture to unmask
My heart and view the hell that’s there.”
She tapped with restless fingers on the windowpane, muttering:
“What a dismal, dreary day! I wish I had gone to Florida with Arthur and Fred. There all is sunshine and beauty, while here in Virginia the rain drips down the pane like tears, the winds howl like a banshee, and the leafless vines tap against the walls like ghostly fingers. I hate it all, I hate my life that is gray and cold like the day.”
A sudden thought came to her like an inspiration:
“I will join Arthur at Weir Lake. True, that girl is there; but what of that? Her father is in California, they say, so he will not be there to trouble my peace. Why should he trouble it anyway? He is nothing to me, less than nothing. I hate him. I suppose that woman who was with them abroad, that beautiful, blue-eyed actress, means to marry him in the end. That is why she clings so close to the daughter. Time was when he cared nothing for these vivacious blondes, and adored dark eyes as if he saw heaven reflected in them. That is all past now. He knows the devil that lurks in a woman wronged. Yes—yes, I will join Arthur. I ought to see about the rebuilding of the old home myself.”
She strained her eyes through the murky rain toward the gate at a man who was striding along under an umbrella with a free, swinging gait too fatally familiar to her memory.
She pressed her hand to her throbbing heart.
“It is he! He has come back to see that old woman, his sister! How the old feelings stir in me at sight of him again. I wonder if—if—there was the least truth in his words that I had wronged him. His anger was most bitter and unforgiving. Yes—yes, I will leave here to-morrow. I can not breathe the same air with him!”
It was indeed Everard Dawn passing the gates of Idlewild without a glance at the windows where those anguished dark eyes watched him so eagerly between the blur of rain and mist.