“All right; thank you. I’ll be right down,” she said.
She arose in a small flutter of excitement, and patted her faultless hair before the mirror, turning her head this way and that. Gone was her doubtfulness, her wistfulness; she had brightened like a mirror when a lamp is brought into the room. The warm color in her cheeks deepened, and her eyes felicitated their doubles in the mirror. Lightly she fluttered down the broad stairway to the tiled hall below. At the entrance to the parlor she paused a moment, then swept back the heavy curtain with such an air as one might use in unveiling a statue.
A man, sitting in the big Turkish rocking-chair between the front windows, rose hastily to his feet. He was a compact, short-statured, middle-aged man, with a look of grave alertness behind the friendly set of his face.
“Mrs. Wendell?” he murmured, coming forward.
“And so you,” she said, still poising between the curtains, “are Ames Hallton!” Immediately she laughed. “That sounds like melodrama,” she exclaimed. “I’m very glad to see you.”
They shook hands. Her eyes continued to regard him with the puzzled interest that wonderful objects frequently inspire when seen closely. There was a faint shadow of disappointment on her face, but she did not allow it to linger.
“It was kind—it was awf’ly kind of you to come,” she said. “Sha’n’t we sit down? Do you know, I almost thought you wouldn’t come.”
“Your letter was very interesting,” he returned dryly.
“I tried to make it that way—so interesting that you just couldn’t keep from coming.” She folded her hands in her brown-silk lap and gravely bowed her head so that light from the window could bring out the copper tints in her hair. She felt the judicial expression of the gray eyes watching her, and chose the simplest means of making partizans of them. “I was quite desperate, and after I’d read your ‘Love’s Ordeal’ I knew you were the one person who could help me.”
“Have you already left your husband?” he inquired.