“Well, you must remember he’s a No’therner!”
Burton’s conduct on the afternoon of the day which had given him his first glimpse of the girl in the rose-garden did nothing to dispel the growing conviction that there was something strange and mysterious about his presence in Belle Harbour. Armed with a sketch-book, he wandered aimlessly the length of King’s Street, smoked four cigarettes in the shade of the church-yard chestnuts, and subsequently wandered aimlessly home again without once having set pencil to paper or, apparently, having seen aught but the end of his well-made nose. King’s Street whispered behind its sun-repelling jalousies. And yet Mrs. Phillips’s information, as far as it went, was quite correct, and the mystery was apparent rather than real.
Stephen Burton was an architect. A commission for a costly church edifice for a wealthy congregation in a New Jersey residential village had sent him South in search of details of pure Colonial architecture. He had found more to interest him in Belle Harbour than he had anticipated or than its citizens knew of. The old church was a veritable mine of valuable material, and certain old doorways and gables and porches scattered through the town and over the adjacent country were far too interesting to allow of neglect. Being a man of comfortable means, Burton’s profession was a passion rather than a trade; he could and did afford to accept only those commissions that appealed to him, but having once taken them he put his very best into each, with the result that he was already known, at thirty-eight years of age, as the foremost man in the line of his selection—church and public edifices. He had already spent a week in Belle Harbour; there was no hurry; if he liked, there was another week at his disposal. With an office force that could be entirely depended upon there was no good reason for returning North until it suited his pleasure. This afternoon New York seemed utterly repellent to him; a hot, noisy, dusty city in which were no rose-gardens and no girls in white gowns gathered at the waist with lavender ribbons. Deuce take New York!
When he gained his room, the rear apartment that overlooked the side yard, his first action was to go to the window and survey the prospect. He found it disappointing. The roses were there, to be sure, and the hammock; but roses and hammocks do not always in themselves satisfy. He lighted a pipe and wondered a trifle impatiently why the denizens of the house beyond the box-hedged garden kept indoors when there was a cool and shady porch and a comfortable hammock awaiting them. He felt somewhat aggrieved over it. When Bob—the general factotum of the establishment—brought up his supper and set the frayed white cloth over the table Burton contemplated making inquiries as to the occupants of the house at whose blank windows he had been gazing for the better part of an hour. But on second thought he refrained; there was something alluring in the thought of nursing his ignorance; he could give his fancy full swing and make of the rose-filled space beyond the iron fence an Enchanted Garden and of the girl in white an imprisoned Princess. The idea appealed to him, and he recalled with satisfaction that the voice he had heard calling from the house—that is to say, Castle—had sounded Blue Beardish to a degree. So he merely sent Bob for a fresh syphon of soda and uncorked the bottle of Scotch whiskey with a thrill of something approaching excitement.
Burton frequently wondered, when he gazed about his apartments, why he had thought it necessary to rent two rooms from Mrs. Phillips. So far as space went one would have been quite enough. The front room overlooked King’s Street, or would have done so had the trees which grew close to the windows allowed, and was broad and long and high, with white walls and ceiling against which three old yellow-stained steel engravings looked lamentably inadequate. Even the big four-poster bed seemed lost in the immensity of the apartment. The rear room was more cheerful. It was no smaller and there were the same glaringly white walls, but the furnishings were more numerous and the adornments more ambitious. Here he was the proud possessor of six pictures, a framed sampler, three advertising calendars, and two lithographed mottoes. He never tired of studying the sampler; its artistic effects fascinated him even though the information conveyed was but slight: