Then Lucy Dean turned on her heel with right-about-face rapidity and vanished around the corner of the corridor; while Tom Brownell, half angry, half fascinated, and wholly amazed, went down the marble stairs two steps at a time, a difficult feat, and one that would have made the very correct man at the door suspect that the visitor had been summarily ejected, if it had not been for the expression of Brownell’s face, which, by the time he reached the bottom stair, wore a decidedly satisfied smile.
When Lucy Dean returned to the den, she found Brooke leaning upon the desk, her head still pillowed by her arms, and fast asleep. Checking her first impulse to waken Brooke and discuss the episode of the reporter, Lucy stood thinking a moment, looked at the clock, then, drawing a sheet of paper toward her, wrote a few words upon it in vigorous upright characters, placed it where the sleeper could not fail to see it the moment her eyes opened, and, after rearranging her furs, that she had thrown off when she had returned from her walk, vanished from the room.
Her coming and going made a mental movement, for there had been no sound. Brooke raised her head, and looking about in a dazed way spied the note, which said, “As everybody and thing seems to be asleep, have gone home to dine with father; will be back before ten.”
It was a positive relief to Brooke to be quite alone for a few hours, and it would also give her the chance to see the physicians more satisfactorily; they were due about six.
Going to her own room, she found her mother had returned to the sick room, so, slipping on a wrapper and loosening the tension of hair-pains, she busied herself by laying away in closet and dresser various things that had lain about since two nights before, which Olga, the maid, under stress of confusion, had neglected. Taking up her great chinchilla muff from a chair, she was shaking it in an absent-minded fashion before putting it in its box, when something slipped from it and fell lightly to the carpet. Groping in the dim light, she picked up, not her card case, as she expected, but the silk-covered catalogue of the Parkses’ pictures and the souvenir menu in its frame of silver filigree. It was only two days since she had put them in her muff, but it seemed almost as if she were looking back from another world.