CHARLIE STREFFORD'S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the Nelson Vanderlyns' palace called for loftier analogies.
Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susy. Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great shadowy staircase, their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a ceiling weighed down with Olympians, their chilly evening in a corner of a drawing room where minuets should have been danced before a throne, contrasted with the happy intimacies of Como as their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted with the mutual confidence of the day before.
The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing had had too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things over not to make a special effort to hide from each other the ravages of their first disagreement. But, deep down and invisible, the disagreement remained; and compunction for having been its cause gnawed at Susy's bosom as she sat in her tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a tarnished mirror.
"I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of scale," she mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move back and forward in the dim recesses of the mirror. "And yet," she continued, "Ellie Vanderlyn's hardly half an inch taller than I am; and she certainly isn't a bit more dignified .... I wonder if it's because I feel so horribly small to-night that the place seems so horribly big."
She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome and high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever before been oppressed by the evidences of wealth.
She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped hands .... Even now she could not understand what had made her take the cigars. She had always been alive to the value of her inherited scruples: her reasoned opinions were unusually free, but with regard to the things one couldn't reason about she was oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken Streffy's cigars! She had taken them--yes, that was the point--she had taken them for Nick, because the desire to please him, to make the smallest details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious, had become her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him, precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have scorned to commit for herself; and, since he hadn't instantly felt the difference, she would never be able to explain it to him.
She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and glanced around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had said something about the Signora's having left a letter for her; and there it lay on the writing-table, with her mail and Nick's; a thick envelope addressed in Ellie's childish scrawl, with a glaring "Private" dashed across the corner.
"What on earth can she have to say, when she hates writing so,"
Susy mused.
She broke open the envelope, and four or five stamped and sealed letters fell from it. All were addressed, in Ellie's hand, to Nelson Vanderlyn Esqre; and in the corner of each was faintly pencilled a number and a date: one, two, three, four--with a week's interval between the dates.
"Goodness--" gasped Susy, understanding.
She had dropped into an armchair near the table, and for a long time she sat staring at the numbered letters. A sheet of paper covered with Ellie's writing had fluttered out among them, but she let it lie; she knew so well what it would say! She knew all about her friend, of course; except poor old Nelson, who didn't, But she had never imagined that Ellie would dare to use her in this way. It was unbelievable ... she had never pictured anything so vile .... The blood rushed to her face, and she sprang up angrily, half minded to tear the letters in bits and throw them all into the fire.
She heard her husband's knock on the door between their rooms, and swept the dangerous packet under the blotting-book.
"Oh, go away, please, there's a dear," she called out; "I haven't finished unpacking, and everything's in such a mess."
Gathering up Nick's papers and letters, she ran across the room and thrust them through the door. "Here's something to keep you quiet," she laughed, shining in on him an instant from the threshold.
She turned back feeling weak with shame. Ellie's letter lay on the floor: reluctantly she stooped to pick it up, and one by one the expected phrases sprang out at her.
"One good turn deserves another .... Of course you and Nick are welcome to stay all summer .... There won't be a particle of expense for you--the servants have orders .... If you'll just be an angel and post these letters yourself .... It's been my only chance for such an age; when we meet I'll explain everything. And in a month at latest I'll be back to fetch Clarissa ...."
Susy lifted the letter to the lamp to be sure she had read aright. To fetch Clarissa! Then Ellie's child was here? Here, under the roof with them, left to their care? She read on, raging. "She's so delighted, poor darling, to know you're coming. I've had to sack her beastly governess for impertinence, and if it weren't for you she'd be all alone with a lot of servants I don't much trust. So for pity's sake be good to my child, and forgive me for leaving her. She thinks I've gone to take a cure; and she knows she's not to tell her Daddy that I'm away, because it would only worry him if he thought I was ill. She's perfectly to be trusted; you'll see what a clever angel she is ...." And then, at the bottom of the page, in a last slanting postscript: "Susy darling, if you've ever owed me anything in the way of kindness, you won't, on your sacred honour, say a word of this to any one, even to Nick. And I know I can count on you to rub out the numbers."
Susy sprang up and tossed Mrs. Vanderlyn's letter into the fire: then she came slowly back to the chair. There, at her elbow, lay the four fatal envelopes; and her next affair was to make up her mind what to do with them.
