Before Helen could take another step Mrs. Phillips turned her head, as if disturbed unconsciously by the presence of an intruder.
"Oh, is that you, Mrs. Hart?" the older woman asked after a moment of scrutiny. "Did you walk in all this heat? Come over here."
"Helen!" Jackson exclaimed, rising, a trace of annoyance in his tone, as though he had been interrupted in some important business matter.
"Don't get up, Mrs. Phillips," Helen said quickly, and the coldness of her voice surprised her. "I am looking for Venetia."
And without further words she opened the terrace door and stepped into the hall.
"You'll find her about somewhere. Ask John!" Mrs. Phillips called after her coolly.
While the servant departed in search of Venetia, Helen moved restlessly about the long drawing-room, which oppressed her with its close array of dominating furniture, thinking of the two outside upon the terrace. She had no suspicion of wrong between them, or, indeed, any jealousy of this woman, who she well knew liked men—all men. Yet an unfamiliar pain gripped her heart. Slowly, for many months, she had felt some mysterious and hostile force entering her field, and now she seemed to see it pictured, dramatized here before her in this little scene,—a man and a woman with chairs pulled close together, their faces aglow with eager thoughts. The other part of her husband, that grosser side of him which she dimly felt and put forth from her mind with dread, was on intimate terms with this woman, who fed his ambitions. And the wife, suddenly, instinctively, hated her for it.
There was nothing evil, however, between those two on the terrace. The architect had come from town by an early train to see the polo, and there Mrs. Phillips had found him, and had brought him home in her automobile. She had just learned a piece of news that concerned the architect closely, and they were discussing it in the shade and quiet of the north terrace.
"I know they're going to start soon. The judge let it out at dinner last night. He's no friend of yours, of course, because I like you. But he won't take the trouble to fight you. You must get hold of your cousin and the other trustees."
It was here that Mrs. Phillips, in her eagerness for his success, laid her hand on the young man's arm. Jackson murmured his thanks, thinking less of the widow than of the trustees of the Powers Jackson bequest.