At the jest Annandale turned. There, pretty as a peach but rather more amusing, stood Fanny Price.
“Hamlet!” she exclaimed.
Annandale resembled the Dane as little as he did the devil. He was fully aware of that. But he was equally aware that he must seem blue. He straightened himself and smiled. Then at once it occurred to him that Fanny might be a signal bearer.
“How do you do?” he said. “Don’t you want to come and sit on the terrace? When did you get here?”
“Just now. I am over from Newport. They told me there that I ought to come in disguise. They call it slumming.”
“Yes,” Annandale inanely and eagerly replied. Of the little speech he had caught but one word—Newport.
“Now, if I go with you, will you give me something pink, something with raspberries in it?”
Fanny, as she spoke, disengaged herself from the people with whom she had come.
“You saw Sylvia, didn’t you?” he asked, when at last through coils of girls and men they reached the terrace below.
Fanny nodded. “Suppose we sit here,” she said, indicating a table from which grew a big parasol.
“Did she say anything?”
Fanny sat down. Annandale seated himself by her. “You know? Don’t you—?”
“Oh, yes,” Fanny interrupted. “But then—”
“Then what?”
“Nothing. Only it is so much better so, don’t you think?”
“Better!” Annandale fiercely repeated.
“Why, yes. You and Sylvia were totally unsuited for each other. She is the best and dearest girl in the world. But—here is the waiter. Will you tell him to fetch me a lemon squash?”
Annandale gave the order.
“With raspberries in it,” Fanny called at the waiter’s retreating back. “Aren’t you going to take anything?”
In deep gloom Annandale shook his head.
Fanny laughed. “Drink delights you not; no, nor woman either.”
“You see—”
“Yes, yes, yes. Of course I see. But why cannot you? Why can’t you see that you and Sylvia stood as much chance of hitting it off as though you both spoke a different language? A break was bound to come.”
But now the man appeared with the squash. Fanny looked at it. “Only two raspberries,” she cried. “And such little ones.”
“Bring a dish of them,” said Annandale. “I suppose,” he resumed as the waiter again retreated, “I suppose she will find somebody with whom she can hit it off.”
“Yes, of course. There is me and there are other girls. But the men will be few. They will be elderly, I think, and I think, too, tame enough to eat out of her hand.”
“You think, then, that I am out of the running?”
Fanny did not answer. She was drinking the squash. When she put it down she put with it the subject. It bored her.
“Are you going to be here long?” she asked. Until a moment before Annandale had been wavering. But now his mind was made up. Or he thought it was.
“No. I am off tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“The North Woods, perhaps. I am not sure.”
“If you are not sure, you cannot be in any very tearing haste. Why not stop a day or two longer and take me about?”
Annandale looked at her. In the look was surprise; inquiry, too.
“Yes. Why not?”
Annandale’s look deepened into a stare.
“Now, don’t be stupid,” said Fanny, to whom such stares were familiar. “I am not trying to get up a flirtation with you. But I must have someone to talk to.”
“I like to hear you talk.”
“Yes; men always like nonsense.”
“Only from a pretty girl, though.”
“Do you know,” said Fanny, rising from beneath the big parasol, “the waiter didn’t bring the raspberries. No matter now, though. I must go and find mother. This is no place for her to be out alone.”
VIII
Two in a Turret
From a back gallery of the Casino a narrow stair leads to a tower. Up that stair Annandale one afternoon invited Fanny Price.
A fortnight had gone, two weeks of dressing and undressing, of dinners, dances and dips; a succession of mellow mornings; long, green afternoons, dusks stabbed by sudden stars and nights lit by a moon that painted the ocean, penetrated the shadows, checkered the underbrush with silver spots.
But now, though the mornings were as mellow and the afternoons as green, though in the air the same madness subsisted and the nights were as languid as before, verandas were emptying, there were wide spaces where once were thick crowds. The end of the season had come.
In the procession of these things Annandale had put the North Woods from him; he had put, too, the thought of journeying abroad. With them he had put also any hope that Sylvia would signal him back.
For awhile the hope had persisted, as the light of a candle persists. Then it had dwindled, flickered and sunk. That is the way with hope. Though sometimes it is snuffed. You are in darkness. But through that darkness occasionally another light will be upheld. It may not, perhaps, be intended for you, but it may enable you to see.
Aided by another light, Annandale had begun to discern his way. He should, of course, have remained in darkness. To darkness, were this fiction, he would be condemned. But this is not fiction. The drama with which these pages deal is documented from life. It was Fanny who held the light.
During the month that had gone he had been almost constantly at her side. The fact that one light may be replaced by another had not at first occurred to him. Presently the ease with which such substitution can be effected had mystified him very much. He was not prepared for anything of the kind. He had arranged to be a gloomy, disappointed man. He kept telling himself that if Sylvia had stuck to him he would have been true to her his whole life through. But she had not stuck to him, and the withdrawal of herself had left existence so empty that, unknown even to him, Nature had been filling the vacuum which she abhors.
In this, Nature had
