“Hello! You back?” Glenn leaned higher on his elbow. “I’m here entertaining Ariel. You asked me to look out for her when I put you on your train, and I’ve been doing my duty ever since. You ought to be gratified to find me at it.”
“It must be late. You’d better be at your dance, hadn’t you? And isn’t this getting the house cold?”
“Fresh air is the best thing that could happen to this house,” Glenn responded cryptically. “But if you think Joan may catch cold, shut the door. We don’t mind, do we Ariel?”
“Well, I want to talk to Ariel myself, since she’s awake. And you do belong down at your own party.”
Glenn got up. “Oh, I know I’m probably spoiling the party for poor Joan, absenting myself for so long. I’ll go do my duty by _her_, now that you’ve relieved me of Ariel. Glad you’re back, Hugh. Good night, Ariel.”
Glenn’s mockery affected Hugh hardly at all. For the minute he was intent on the things that he must say to Ariel,—at once, now, to-night, since it had so chanced that he was seeing her to-night. “_May_ I stay a few minutes?” he asked. “You aren’t sleepy?”
He pushed a chair within a little distance of the bed. Hugh’s generation, no more than Glenn’s, was patterned to a conventional idea of manners, but Hugh himself as an individual had never quite attained the modern casualness. Still, Ariel, tented to her chin in the eiderdown, her face a mere blur in the starry light, was not exactly a figure to inspire self-consciousness in him.
“I’ve just been talking with Grandam,” he plunged at once into what was on his mind. “And I say, Ariel, I am more sorry than I can tell about ‘Noon.’ Why I didn’t have it out, at least, before you got here, I can’t see now. Grandam considers herself lucky to have acquired it for her mantel now. But she’ll lend it to the exhibition, of course. I’ll get in touch with Charlie Frye about that the first minute we hear from him. And afterwards ‘Noon’ is to be yours. It doesn’t belong to me after the way I’ve treated it, of course.”
“After Grandam dies”—Ariel said the word without fear—“I’m going to buy ‘Noon’ from you, Hugh Weyman. You must let her keep it till then. I’ve already told her. She understands, and she’s going to help me so that I _can_ buy it. She knows about a job she thinks I can get. The minute I begin to earn, I shall begin to save—toward ‘Noon’ and toward my lovely white coat.”