"Ugh! Humph!" quoth Willoughby.
CHAPTER IV
OUR LOVING FRIENDS
AS it chanced the Hepworths were not particularly fortunate in their choice of an evening for the dinner so gloomily anticipated by their guests. The weather was unpropitious. All day rain had threatened, and the air had been almost sultry, a parting word flung over her shoulder to autumn by a mischievous July who should long ago have vanished. As the evening wore on clouds banked more densely upon the horizon, occasionally muttering thunder, and this electric hint of storm in the air had in some way communicated itself to the mental atmosphere. A sense of foreboding, a consciousness of discord, seemed to swell ominously now and again beneath the smooth and colorful surface of the dinner. Even the dullest of the guests felt that, and to the intuitive, the stately progress of the meal was nerve-racking.
When the hostess rose, every individual sigh of relief involuntarily exhaled became a chorus, shocking in volume.
They winced nervously, but in spite of it, each guest stood by his guns. They had, apparently with one mind, and certainly with one voice, decided against bridge. The ordeal of dinner bravely borne, licensed them, they felt, even bestowed the accolade of privilege on them, to escape the prevalent atmosphere of unrest as quickly as possible.
In the brief time they had allotted themselves to remain, barely skirting the limits of conventional decency, Alice Wilstead, Isabel and Willoughby Hewston and Wallace Martin had elected to take their coffee and cigarettes on a small balcony opening from the drawing-room by long French windows and giving upon a garden, quite half of a city block, with thick, close-cropped lawn, and black masses of dense shrubbery permeating the damp and sultry air with the mingled fragrance of earth and leaves and some late-blooming flowers. Maud Carmine, good-natured as usual, had seated herself at the piano, across the length of the room from the balcony, to play a ballad of Chaminade's at her host's request.
Hepworth, who alone appeared to be oblivious of the sinister atmospheric influences, leaned his elbows on the piano and listened, occasionally unhesitatingly breaking the flow of the music with conversation.
With their friend and host thus comfortably within sight, yet out of earshot, the group on the balcony felt at liberty to speak with freedom; no danger of sudden appearances, consequent jumps and hot wonder at what might have been overheard.