He wrote on, forgetful of the passing hours, till the door opened and he heard a step behind him. The next moment two hands were clasped over his eyes, and the air was full of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s last new scent.
“You dear thing–I’m just off, you know,” she said. “Susy told me you were working, and I forbade her to call you down. She and Streffy are waiting to take me to the station, and I’ve run up to say good-bye.”
“Ellie, dear!” Full of compunction, Lansing pushed aside his writing and started up; but she pressed him back into his seat.
“No, no! I should never forgive myself if I’d interrupted you. I oughtn’t to have come up; Susy didn’t want me to. But I had to tell you, you dear …. I had to thank you…”
In her dark travelling dress and hat, so discreetly conspicuous, so negligent and so studied, with a veil masking her paint, and gloves hiding her rings, she looked younger, simpler, more natural than he had ever seen her. Poor Ellie such a good fellow, after all!
“To thank me? For what? For being so happy here?” he laughed, taking her hands.
She looked at him, laughed back, and flung her arms about his neck.
“For helping me to be so happy elsewhere–you and Susy, you two blessed darlings!” she cried, with a kiss on his cheek.
Their eyes met for a second; then her arms slipped slowly downward, dropping to her sides. Lansing sat before her like a stone.
“Oh,” she gasped, “why do you stare so? Didn’t you know …?”
They heard Strefford’s shrill voice on the stairs. “Ellie, where the deuce are you? Susy’s in the gondola. You’ll miss the train!”
Lansing stood up and caught Mrs. Vanderlyn by the wrist. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, nothing … But you were both such bricks about the letters …. And when Nelson was here, too …. Nick, don’t hurt my wrist so! I must run!”
He dropped her hand and stood motionless, staring after her and listening to the click of her high heels as she fled across the room and along the echoing corridor.
When he turned back to the table he noticed that a small morocco case had fallen among his papers. In falling it had opened, and before him, on the pale velvet lining, lay a scarf-pin set with a perfect pearl. He picked the box up, and was about to hasten after Mrs. Vanderlyn–it was so like her to shed jewels on her path!–when he noticed his own initials on the cover.
He dropped the box as if it had been a hot coal, and sat for a long while gazing at the gold N. L., which seemed to have burnt itself into his flesh.
At last he roused himself and stood up.
Chapter X.
With a sigh of relief Susy drew the pins from her hat and threw herself down on the lounge.
The ordeal she had dreaded was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Vanderlyn had safely gone their several ways. Poor Ellie was not noted for prudence, and when life smiled on her she was given to betraying her gratitude too openly; but thanks to Susy’s vigilance (and, no doubt, to Strefford’s tacit co-operation), the dreaded twenty-four hours were happily over. Nelson Vanderlyn had departed without a shadow on his brow, and though Ellie’s, when she came down from bidding Nick good-bye, had seemed to Susy less serene than usual, she became her normal self as soon as it was discovered that the red morocco bag with her jewel-box was missing. Before it had been discovered in the depths of the gondola they had reached the station, and there was just time to thrust her into her “sleeper,” from which she was seen to wave an unperturbed farewell to her friends.
“Well, my dear, we’ve been it through,” Strefford remarked with a deep breath as the St. Moritz express rolled away.
“Oh,” Susy sighed in mute complicity; then, as if to cover her self-betrayal: “Poor darling, she does so like what she likes!”
“Yes–even if it’s a rotten bounder,” Strefford agreed.