From the lower hall the clock chimed one with musical vibrations. Edith leaned forward with her chin on her hand, driving her thoughts into a definite path. The curtains stirred in a breeze from the out-of-doors whose domain swept with country greenness and adventitious care away from the window under the high brilliance of the sun.
Close to the window a writing-table, with blotter, pens, and ink, made a focal-point for her gaze. At first a mere detail in her line of vision, it attained by degrees, it seemed, a definite relevancy to her train of thought. She looked in her portmanteau for her desk, and getting out some note-paper, went to the table and began to write a letter.
What she had to say seemed difficult to decide. She wrote a line, stared out of the window with fixity, and then wrote again--a flurry of quick, decisive strokes as if at determinate pressure. But a sigh struck across her mood, and almost against her will the puzzled crinkle returned to her brow. The curtain blew against her face, disarranging her hair, and as she lifted her hand to put back a straggling lock, the wind tossed the sheet of the letter she was writing out of the window. Her eyes, as she sprang up, followed its flight, but it whirled around the corner of the house and was lost to her desperate gaze.
Négligé, even of the most-becoming description, was not to be thought of in pursuing the loss, for the silence of the house had stirred to the sound of gay voices, the movement of feet.
Rose, also in négligé, opened the door between them and found her madly tearing off her pale-blue kimono. “What's the matter?” She paused, staring.
“Heavens! My shoes--please!--there by the table.” She kicked off her ridiculous blue slippers and pulled on the small colonials her sister in open wonder handed her. “If you had only been dressed,” she almost wailed, “you might have been able to get it.”
“My letter!” Tragic, in spite of a mouthful of pins--which is a woman's undoubted preference, no matter how many befrilled pincushions entreat a division of spoils,--she turned her face with its import of sudden things to her sister in explanation. “I was writing a letter and it blew out of the window!”
“But, don't you see?--I was writing to _Christopher!_ I had been thinking and thinking, and at last I screwed up my courage to answer his letter. I had all but signed my name!”