“Oh, some people that Witherby met in Portland at Willett's, who used to have the logging-camp out here.”
“That Montreal woman!” cried Marcia, with fatal divination.
Bartley laughed. “Yes, Mrs. Macallister and her husband. She's a regular case. She'll amuse you.”
Marcia's passionate eyes blazed. “She shall never come to my picnic in the world!”
“No?” Bartley looked at her in a certain way. “She shall come to mine, then. There will be two picnics. The more the merrier.”
Marcia gasped, as if she felt the clutch in which her husband had her tightening on her heart. She said that she could only carry her point against him at the cost of disgraceful division before the Hallecks, for which he would not care in the least. She moved her head a little from side to side, like one that breathes a stifling air. “Oh, let her come,” she said quietly, at last.
“Now you're talking business,” said Bartley. “I haven't forgotten the little snub Mrs. Macallister gave me, and you'll see me pay her off.”
Marcia made no answer, but went downstairs to put what face she could upon the matter to Olive, whom she had left alone in the parlor, while she ran up with Bartley immediately upon his arrival to demand an explanation of him. In her wrathful haste she had forgotten to kiss him, and she now remembered that he had not looked at the baby, which she had all the time had in her arms.
The picnic was to be in a pretty glen three or four miles north of the village, where there was shade on a bit of level green, and a spring bubbling out of a fern-hung bluff: from which you looked down the glen over a stretch of the river. Marcia had planned that they were to drive thither in a four-seated carryall, but the addition of Bartley's guests disarranged this.
“There's only one way,” said Mrs. Macallister, who had driven up with her husband from the hotel to the Squire's house in a buggy. “Mr. Halleck tells me he doesn't know how to drive, and my husband doesn't know the way. Mr. Hubbard must get in here with me, and you must take Mr. Macallister in your party.” She looked authoritatively at the others.