Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/288

268 from the out-of-doors whose domain swept with country greenness and adventitious care away from the window under the high brilliance of the sun.

Close to the window a writing-table, with blotter, pens, and ink, made a focal-point for her gaze. At first a mere detail in her line of vision, it attained by degrees, it seemed, a definite relevancy to her train of thought. She looked in her portmanteau for her desk, and getting out some note-paper, went to the table and began to write a letter.

What she had to say seemed difficult to decide. She wrote a line, stared out of the window with fixity, and then wrote again—a flurry of quick, decisive strokes as if at determinate pressure. But a sigh struck across her mood, and almost against her will the puzzled crinkle returned to her brow. The curtain blew against her face, disarranging her hair, and as she lifted her hand to put back a straggling lock, the wind tossed the sheet of the letter she was writing out of the window. Her eyes, as she sprang up, followed its flight, but it whirled around the corner of the house and was lost to her desperate gaze.

Négligé, even of the most becoming description, was not to be thought of in pursuing the loss, for the silence of the house had stirred to the sound of gay voices, the movement of feet.

Rose, also in négligé, opened the door between them and found her madly tearing off her pale-blue kimono. "What's the matter?" She paused, staring.

"Heavens! My shoes—please!—there by the table." She kicked off her ridiculous blue slippers and pulled on the small colonials her sister in open wonder handed her. "If you had only been dressed," she almost wailed, "you might have been able to get it."

"Get what?"

"My letter!" Tragic, in spite of a mouthful of pins—which is a woman's undoubted preference, no matter how many befrilled pincushions entreat a division of spoils,—she turned her face with its import of sudden things to her sister in explanation. "I was writing a letter and it blew out of the window!"

"Well, if it did—"

"But, don't you see?—I was writing to Christopher! I had been thinking and thinking, and at last I screwed up my courage to answer his letter. I had all but signed my name!"

Rose Eversley began to laugh helplessly; heartlessly, her sister thought.

"If you hadn't signed it—" she at last comforted her sister's indignant face that was reflected from the mirror, where she stood as she fastened the white stock at her throat and snapped the clasp of her belt.

"Signed it!" She was almost in tears. "What difference will that make when I claim the letter? I must find it! But of course some one who knows me will be sure to find it. And that letter, of all letters!"

"If I were you, Edith," Bose advised, calmly, "I shouldn't—"

"Well?"—with her hand on the doorknob.

"—try to find it. It will be impossible to trace it to you, in that case."

"But don't you see— Oh, I must get it!"

"Wait!" Bose caught and pulled her back. "How could they know? You'll get in much deeper. What had you written?"

"I said, 'Dear Christopher'—"

Bose laughed. "I'm glad you didn't say 'Dear Mr. Brander.' In that case you'd have given him away. But 'Christopher' is such an unusual name, they might—Sherlock Holmes could trace him by it alone."

"You are a Job's comforter—a perfect Eliphaz the Temanite! Oh, oh!" Her soft crescendo was again tragic.

"In effect you said: 'Dear Christopher, as you have so often entreated, I have at last decided to be thine. The tinkle of thy shekels, now that I am so nearly shekelless myself, has done its fatal worst. I am thine—

"Oh, let me go!" Edith cried, in a fury close to tears. "You haven't any feeling. You are not going to sacrifice yourself!"

"To a good-looking young man who loves me exceedingly, and to something over a million? No, I am not!" Bose said, dryly.

"Oh, it's dreadful! Perfectly!" Edith cried, and on her indecision Bose hung another bit of wisdom:

"Why don't you go down in a leisure-