Three o'clock! Then Gannett would
soon be back--he had told her to expect him before four. She rose
hurriedly, her face averted from the inquisitorial facade of the hotel.
She could not see him just yet; she could not go indoors. She slipped
through one of the overgrown garden-alleys and climbed a steep path to the
hills.
It was dark when she opened their sitting-room door. Gannett was sitting
on the window-ledge smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were now his chief
resource: he had not written a line during the two months they had spent
at the Hotel Bellosguardo. In that respect, it had turned out not to be
the right _milieu_ after all.
He started up at Lydia's entrance.
"Where have you been? I was getting anxious."
She sat down in a chair near the door.
"Up the mountain," she said wearily.
"Alone?"
"Yes."
Gannett threw away his cigarette: the sound of her voice made him want to
see her face.
"Shall we have a little light?" he suggested.
She made no answer and he lifted the globe from the lamp and put a match
to the wick. Then he looked at her.
"Anything wrong? You look done up."
She sat glancing vaguely about the little sitting-room, dimly lit by the
pallid-globed lamp, which left in twilight the outlines of the furniture,
of his writing-table heaped with books and papers, of the tea-roses and
jasmine drooping on the mantel-piece. How like home it had all grown--how
like home!
"Lydia, what is wrong?" he repeated.
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