Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/348



OME! What was this new difference in the big, quiet, clean, cool, perfectly kept halls and rooms? Not in the walls and furnishings, not in any single item of decoration or arrangement; everything was precisely as it always had been in summer; yet what a strange place, her home! How could one house become, in a few short months, so profoundly different from what it had been before that night of the Lovells' dance and then wholly alter again?

For it had been one place up to that morning which finally dawned with March sunshine on the snow and sparrows and pigeons hopping about as Marjorie looked out her window on the day after her visit to Mrs. Russell's flat on Clearedge Street; on that day and thereafter, as long as Marjorie remained at the house, life in her home had been wholly altered; and now here it was something strange again.

It had not swung back to what originally it had been; no, nothing like that; it seemed, instead, to have swung beyond the point to which it had dropped and reached another point of poise. Something like the pendulum in the big clock in the hall, which had two situations in which it halted and paused. Now up here to the left it swung to its highest point, stopped and stood; that was life in her home as it first had been. Now it dropped to the bottom but no stop there; just a swing through. That was the second situation in her home; that was the March morning; now the swing up