“Well--?” he questioned, from the depths of the chair into which he had sunk.
“Well, Nick doesn’t... doesn’t dream of it. If he knew that we owed our summer here to... to my knowing....”
Strefford sat silent: she felt his astonished stare through the darkness. “Jove!” he said at last, with a low whistle Susy bent over the balustrade, her heart thumping against the stone rail.
“What was left of soul, I wonder--?” the young composer’s voice shrilled through the open windows.
Strefford sank into another silence, from which he roused himself only as Susy turned back toward the lighted threshold.
“Well, my dear, we’ll see it through between us; you and I--and Clarissa,” he said with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow: “I can never hear that thing sung without wanting to cry like a baby.”
NELSON VANDERLYN, still in his travelling clothes, paused on the threshold of his own dining-room and surveyed the scene with pardonable satisfaction.
He was a short round man, with a grizzled head, small facetious eyes and a large and credulous smile.
At the luncheon table sat his wife, between Charlie Strefford and Nick Lansing. Next to Strefford, perched on her high chair, Clarissa throned in infant beauty, while Susy Lansing cut up a peach for her. Through wide orange awnings the sun slanted in upon the white-clad group.
“Well--well--well! So I’ve caught you at it!” cried the happy father, whose inveterate habit it was to address his wife and friends as if he had surprised them at an inopportune moment. Stealing up from behind, he lifted his daughter into the air, while a chorus of “Hello, old Nelson,” hailed his appearance.
It was two or three years since Nick Lansing had seen Mr. Vanderlyn, who was now the London representative of the big New York bank of Vanderlyn & Co., and had exchanged his sumptuous house in Fifth Avenue for another, more sumptuous still, in Mayfair; and the young man looked curiously and attentively at his host.
Mr. Vanderlyn had grown older and stouter, but his face still kept its look of somewhat worn optimism. He embraced his wife, greeted Susy affectionately, and distributed cordial hand-grasps to the two men.