"To open the rooms." He had not the heart to tell her how sharp were the tongues of the gossips of the little town.
So Delia, a little later, limped after them with Peter following, confidently.
"And you flirted with Justin," Anthony remarked on the way over.
"Yes. In the little tea room. Diana and Mrs. Martens sat at one table, and Mr. Ford and I at the other--and he was so funny--and I----Well, _any one_ looking on might have thought I was in earnest."
"Of course not. It's not announced, you know."
"Silly," Bettina tucked her hand in his arm, "nobody takes me in earnest--but you----"
Her hesitation was charming, but he did not respond ardently, and perhaps she missed something in his manner, for presently she asked, "Are you jealous?"
She sighed a little. "Am I such a child?"
He laughed again. "Of course, you're a mere baby--but a dear baby, Betty mine."
"I am going to put in the things which were in the old house before I turned it into a sanatorium. My grandfather was a sea captain, and I have a model of a ship carved by one of his sailors out of soup bones, and there are two great china tureens in the shape of swans, and some ivories and queer embroidered screens that I wouldn't take anything for. It's a sort of jumble for a modern residence, but I like it. And I have had the house built in a style which will be in keeping with my belongings. It's rocky and rugged and there's a fireplace in every room. I like to burn logs for cheerfulness even when there's a furnace--and to come home to the light of them on winter nights."
"I love pretty new things," Bettina informed him. "May I have all white for my room? With ivory things on my dresser with silver monograms, and--white fur rugs?"
It came to Anthony, with the force of a blow, that there was no room in the big house for Bettina.
Why, that room was Diana's--that room which looked out on Minot's. He had thought of her as inhabiting it. He had never meant that the great light should say, "I love you," to Bettina.
For months, even when he felt that he had lost Diana, her spirit had seemed to dwell in the place he had planned for her. Whenever he had entered her room it had not seemed bare, for his imagination had filled it with the furniture which had been his grandmother's wedding set--the big canopied bed, the winged chair on the hearth, the quaint lyre-legged sewing table by the window. And on the other side of the hearth would be another chair--his own. And in that room he had seen Diana, his bride, in the moonlight; his wife, waiting in the winged chair to welcome him after a weary day.