Some minutes later, Margaret, missing the soft motion of the fan, looked up; she smiled when she saw the sleeping figure. It was a warm day, Garda had changed her thin black dress for a white one; through the lace, of which it was princ.i.p.ally composed, her round arms gleamed. She had dropped her fan; her head, with the thick braids of hair wound closely about it, drooped to one side like a flower.

Margaret had smiled to see how easily, as a child does, she had glided into unconsciousness. But the next moment the smile was followed by a heavy sigh. It was a sigh of envy, the page of figures grew dim, then faded from before her eyes, she dropped her head upon her clasped hands in the abandonment of the fresh, the ever-fresh realization of her own dreariness. This realization was never long absent; she might hope that she had forgotten it, or that it had forgotten her; but it always came back.

It happened that at this instant Garda woke; and saw the movement. She came swiftly across to her friend. "Oh, I knew you were unhappy, though you never, never say so! But now I have caught you, I have seen it. And oh, Margaret, you are so changed!--you are the loveliest woman in the world still,--but you have grown so thin; look at your hands." And she held up one of Margaret's hands against the light to show its transparency.

But Margaret drew her hand away. "If I'm thin, I am only following out my privilege as an American woman," she answered, lightly. "Don't you know that we pride ourselves upon remaining slender?"

"Slender--yes; that is what you _were_. Your arms were always slender, and yet round. But now--" She pushed up Margaret's sleeve. "See your poor wrists. Oh, Margaret, I do believe that before long even hollows in your pretty neck will begin to show!"

"How can they, if I always wear high dresses?" said Margaret, smiling.

She rose as she spoke. But if her motive was to escape from further scrutiny, she was not successful; Garda took hold of her and made her sit down on a couch near one of the windows, and standing in front of her to keep her there, she continued her inspection. "Yes, you are thinner. There are little fine lines going down your face. And your face itself has grown narrow. That makes your eyes too large, I don't like your eyes now; they are too big and blue."

"They were always blue, weren't they?"

"_Now_ they are the kind of blue that you see in the eyes of golden-haired children that have got to die," pursued Garda, making one of her curiously accurate comparisons.

Suddenly she held Margaret's hands down with her own left hand, and with her right pushed back swiftly the dark hair; it was the hair that lay low over the forehead; for Lanse's taste was still consulted, his wife's dusky locks rippled softly above her blue eyes, having now certainly nothing of the plain appearance to which he had objected.

The forehead thus suddenly exposed betrayed at the temples a wasted look, with the blue veins conspicuous on the white. "I knew it!" said Garda. She sat down beside her friend, and kissed her with angry tenderness. "What is the matter with you?" she demanded, putting her arms round her and giving her a little shake. "You _shall_ tell me. What is the matter?"

"A very natural thing; I am growing old, that is all." And Margaret tried to rearrange the disordered hair.

"Leave it as it is, I am determined to see the worst of you this time.

You--with all that pretty hair and your pretty dresses--you have managed to conceal it." And again with searching eyes she examined her friend.

"You don't care at all!" she announced.

"Oh yes, I do," said Margaret.

"You don't care in the least. But I care; and something shall be done.

They have worn you out between them--_two_ invalids; I shall speak to Mr. Harold."

Margaret's face altered. "No, Garda, you must not do that."

"But he likes me," said Garda, insistently; "he will say yes to anything I ask--you will see if he doesn't."

And Margaret felt, like a wave, the conviction that he would; more than this, that he would always have said yes if Garda had been the wife instead of herself. Garda would never have been submissive, Garda would never have yielded. But to Garda he would always have said yes.

"I shall certainly speak to him," Garda persisted. "Why shouldn't I not mind what you say, if it is for your good?'

"It would not be for my good."

"But he is kind to you, I know it, because I see it with my own eyes. He thinks you are lovely, he has told me so; he says you are a very rare type. And he himself--he is so agreeable; he says unusual things; he never tires anybody; his very fish-nets are amusing. I like him ever so much; and though he is crippled, he is very handsome--there is such a golden light in his brown eyes."

"He is all that you say," Margaret answered, smiling at this enumeration.

She could talk about her husband readily enough now. As Garda had noticed, he was always kind, his manner had been steadily kind (though not without many a glimpse of inward entertainment gleaming through it) ever since he entered East Angels' doors; he appeared to have taken his wife under his protection, he told Aunt Katrina once for all, and authoritatively (to that lady's amazement), that she must hereafter, in his presence at least, be "less catty" to Margaret. During the one visit which Evert Winthrop had paid to Florida in the same period, Lanse announced to him (in the tone of the old Roman inscription)--"I'm as steady as a church, old lad. I make nets for the poor. I talk to Aunt K.

I'm good to the little people about here. I'm a seraph to Margaret."

Garda's present visit at East Angels had begun but two days before. She had been spending some time in New York with Lish-er and Trude. These ladies having written once a week since their first parting with her, to say that they were sure that she must by this time be needing "a drier air," Garda had at length accepted the suggestion; and tried the air. It proved to be that of Ninth Street; and was indeed remarkably dry. This visit to Margaret was her second one; six months before she had made a long stay at East Angels--so long that Aunt Katrina began to fear that she would never go away. The violence of the grief that had accompanied her first return to Gracias had subsided with singular suddenness; she said to Margaret, in an apathetic tone, "I had to kill it, you know, or else kill myself. I came very near killing myself."

"I was much alarmed about you," Margaret answered, hesitating as to whether or not to say more.

Garda divined her thoughts. "Did you think I was out of my mind? I wasn't at all; it was only that I couldn't bear the pain. Let us never speak of that time again--never! never!" She got up, and for a moment stood trembling and quivering. Then, with the same rapidity and completeness, she resumed her calm.

Margaret never did speak of it again. "But how was it that she killed it--how?" was her dreary thought.

During that first visit, Lanse and Mrs. Spenser had become fast friends; every evening she played checkers with him, and she was the only person with whom he did not bl.u.s.ter over the game; she contradicted him; she made sport of his fish-nets; she used his Fielding for her footstool; she put forward the proposition that her own face was prettier than his Mino outlines.

Lanse denied this. "My Mino outlines are not in the least pretty. But then you are not in the least pretty yourself."

"Not pretty!" said Garda, with a protesting cry. "Why, even a little p.u.s.s.y cat can be pretty."

"I have not been able to discover a trace of prettiness in you." He paused. "You are simply superb," he said, looking at her with his deep bold eyes. "What makes you stay on here?" he added in another tone, surveying her curiously.

Garda turned; but Margaret had by chance left the room. "I was going to point to Margaret," she answered; "I stay because I love her--love to be with her."

"Well, you'll have a career," Lanse announced, briefly.

The next day he said to Aunt Katrina, "I should like to have seen that girl before she was married; there's such an extraordinary richness in her beauty that I don't believe she ever had an awkward age; she was probably graceful at sixteen."

"She was designing at sixteen."

"No! For whom could she have been designing down here?"

"Evert."

"And the idiot let her slip through his fingers?"

"Deliver us!" said the lady. "If I've got to hear _you_ admire her too!"

Late in the evening of the day when she had threatened to speak to Lanse about his wife's health, Garda came and knocked at Margaret's door. "I wanted to see you," she said, entering.

Adolfo had gone an hour before, and she had been in her own room meanwhile; but she had not taken off her white lace attire, or loosened the braids of her hair. Margaret too was fully dressed.

"What have you been doing?" Garda demanded, suspiciously, as she looked at her. "Not crying?"

"I think I have forgotten how to cry."

"Well, your eyes are dry," Garda admitted. She closed the door, then went to one of the windows and looked out. There had been a heavy rain during the evening, and the air was much cooler; it was very dark. She closed the shutters of all the three windows and fastened them. "It's so gloomy out there! Pine cones? What luck! we'll have a fire."

"Garda--we shall melt!"

"No, the room is too large." She piled the cones on the hearth and set fire to them; in an instant the blaze flared out and lighted up all the dusky corners. "That's better. Only one poor miserable little candle?"

And she proceeded to light four others that stood about here and there.

"Are you preparing for a ball?"

"I am preparing for a talk. I'm lonely to-night, Margaret, and I can't bear to feel lonely; how long may I stay? Are you sure you haven't got to go and do something?--say good-night to Mr. Harold, for instance?"