He found Cordelia, excepting the servants, alone in the house. The Spauldings had left the day before for Canada, she told him. Mrs. Spaulding was to stay in Quebec City, while her husband--who had always been fond of shooting--went north for moose. He had found it possible to snatch a three weeks' belated vacation before the winter set in, Cordelia explained, and described with not a little wit the sternness with which he had arisen and dragged away a complaining and none too willing wife.
"Our American husbands, you know, usually show more velvet than claws," she added.
She was gowned in a tightly fitting tailor-made dress of bottle green, trimmed with gold. It seemed to deepen the color of her hair and at the same time to give a touch of girlishness to her figure. She guessed at once what Hartley held in his hand.
"I wonder if it could ever be a Silver Poppy the second?" he asked, as he handed the manuscript over to her. Her mind flashed back to the birth of that earlier book, and for a moment she looked hesitatingly up at him.
"I'd rather read it alone," she said. "Do you mind?"
"I'd rather you did," he answered, wondering at the sudden little sternness that had come over her. It seemed like the shadow on quiet water of a taloned bird he could not see.
"Then I'll leave you in the library to smoke. You said you wanted to see the press notices of the play--I think they'll keep you enough amused," she held the heavy _portières_ aside for him. Then she brought him her huge, heavy scrap-book, and lingered a moment before the mantelpiece mirror while he turned over a few of its first pages.
"May I look over all of it?" he asked, with his head bent over the closely pasted pages of clippings.
"Yes, do; some day I'm going to call that book The Price of Fame."
He looked up from a page he had been glancing over, where a paragraph, more faded than the others about it, caught his eye.
She was fixing her hair before the mirror and did not turn away from it as she answered, after a moment's pause:
And as he dipped from page to page into notices from newspapers and illustrated interviews from weeklies and studies from critical reviews, frowning over some, laughing over others, she slipped away and left him.