The white-capped woman came out. Florence waited until she went into another room farther down the hall. Then she almost pushed Julia in. “No one will come,” she murmured as she closed the door after her.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FLORENCE sat down in the window-seat in the dusky hall. The diamond panes of milky glass let in a misty light. She drew the drapery of the dark curtains around her, the better to insure against interruption. The house was silent at that long hour of the afternoon when all the day’s processes seem to stand still, and heart and brain alike grow torpid. She waited, as still as her still surroundings, a piece with the dull curtain, until an opening door should reanimate her to living.
At the sound of an approaching step—was it an hour or a day she had kept her post?—she started nervously. Through the slightly parted curtains she watched the stair-turn anxiously. That long, dangling, masculine figure was at least not Mrs. Budd. She sighed relief. It was Thair. He came on with his elegant slouch, turning down the hall toward the window embrasure, stopped a moment on the threshold of the morning-room, looking in with a questing turn of his long neck, strolled on, craning at the alcove curtains.
Florence thrust them back. Evidently it was not she he was looking for. He was surprised, and something more, hardly curious, but a look that harked back to what had been revealed him on the terrace.
“I am,” he explained to her, “in search of the young madam.” He added with a considerative smile, “Our last ride together—if _she_ has anything to say about it.”
Her face showed an odd mingling of distress and relief.
“But you will have to wait. She can’t be disturbed now.”
“Well”—he dawdled over it a minute—“but she _will_ be disturbed. _I’ll_ wait, of course; but will—Mrs. Budd?” He brought it out with the faintest embarrassment.
“It’s just what she never _will_ do,” he said. “She’ll expect to see us off.”
Her answer was the dismayed sound that escaped her lips. She put her hand out with a gesture that warned him back. They were like a small secret conclave, shut in their alcove behind the curtains, stilled in the middle of their plots.