"No, Marie-Louise. And we mustn't talk about it. Love is a sacred thing."
"I like to talk about it. In summer I talk to Pan. But he's out now in the snow and his pipes are frozen."
The little drawing-room seemed to Anne anything but little until she learned that there was a larger one across the hall. Austin and his wife went up-stairs as soon as the coffee had been served, and Marie-Louise led Anne through the shadowy vastness of the great drawing-room to a window which overlooked the river. "You can't see the river, but the light over the doorway shines on my old Pan's head. You can see him grinning out of the snow."
The effect of that white head peering from the blackness was uncanny. The shaft of light struck straight across the peaked chin and twisted mouth. The snow had made him a cap which covered his horns and which gave him the look of a rakish old tipster.
"Oh, Marie-Louise, do you talk to him of love?"
"Yes. Wait till you see him in the spring with the pink roses back of him. He seems to get younger in the spring."
Anne, going to bed that night in a suite of rooms which might have belonged to a princess, wondered if she should wake in the morning and find herself dreaming. To have her own bath, a silk canopy over her head, to know that breakfast would be served when she rang for it, and that her mail and newspapers would be brought—these were unbelievable things. She had a feeling that if she told Uncle Rod he would shake his head over it. He had a theory that luxury tended to cramp the soul.
Yet her last thought was not of Uncle Rod but of Richard. She had come intending to give him a sharp opinion of his neglect of Nancy. But he had been so glad to see her, and had given her such a good time. Yet she had spoken of Nancy's loneliness.
"I hated to leave her," she said, "but it seemed as if I had to come."
"Of course," he agreed, with his eyes on her glowing face, "and anyhow, she has Sulie."