He tossed a Pall Mall cigarette box across the table and she opened it. The silver paper was folded carefully over the top. Between it and the bottom layer of cigarettes lay five one hundred dollar bills.
“It’s a long story,” she said, recovering from her surprise. Then she told him about Rob. He stood up to go after she had finished.
“Well,” he said, with some embarrassment, “I do hope you feel it’s a perfectly natural thing for a fellow to open a box of cigarettes lying around on a table. I mean to say—”
“Nonsense. I should have done it myself.”
Miles left her, to go to his accumulated work, bitterly, she knew, and more completely convinced of his uselessness. She sat down to try to think out what was to be done. The owner of the five hundred had taken his train long ago. She did not know where to reach him, and if she did, it would be downright mean to send the money back. She remembered how he had prevented her from opening the box before he had left her. The money was not there by accident. Rob was her schoolboy friend. Perhaps she was only giving herself an excuse, but what good would her self-righteousness do to temper the hurt she knew he would feel? She would accept his gift simply and with thanks. Besides, she had a plan. On the children’s account, on Miles’, on her own, she had long been wanting to put it into execution. This money would enable her to do so, beautifully and without a hitch.
XXII
In the open country near a southern village of Connecticut, not over a brisk morning’s walk to the Sound, sat a smallish farmhouse which was probably a century old. It was an innocent and ordinary enough looking house from the road. It topped a swell of land that was somewhat higher than its immediate surroundings and bare of large trees except for a single magnificent elm halfway between the house and the road. The lawn was allowed to grow wild, but nearer the house and covering the approach to its graceful old doorway were several shrubs in more or less cultivated condition placed on a few feet of clipped sod. In the spring the lawn and the fields which rolled out downward from the house were thickly starred with buttercups whose tiny yellow bowls glistened like lacquered buttons in the sun. Later the same meadows turned to a waving lake of red clover.
Potter Osprey, when upbraided by his friends for not making more of his handful of acres, declared he was no gardener. He could neither adorn nature nor gain his feed from her by his own hands, for she was a wild beast whose moods and colours and contours he had struggled with all his life, and there was no quarter between them. To all offers to prettify her in his immediate neighbourhood he was politely deaf. He wanted her rugged and plain as his plastic, solid canvases liked to interpret her, and that way he could love her as one loves a worthy foe.
On the house itself he had lavished more care. Eight years of his own proprietorship had made it, without any great loss of its ancient character, a place of personal charm inside. In the rear the hill fell sharply from the foundation, and here he had built up a broad concrete terrace, looking northward to an unbroken view of horizon and low hills. Above the terrace for ten or twelve feet in height and almost as wide, rose a vertical sheet of heavy, transparent glass in narrow panels, and this gave light to a large room, which had been made by knocking out walls and upper flooring so that half of it was two stories high. The house practically consisted of this room, a cellar under it, and some small bedrooms above. Outhouse and kitchen stepped away to the west.
From Osprey’s north terrace could be seen a smaller house on the eastern slope, nestling in a very old, gnarled and worn-out orchard. Some of its trees reminded one of those anatomical designs in physiological books; they were half bare-branched skeleton and half green, waving body.