Before she finished speaking, she was back in the room and hurrying on her raincoat.  Mrs. Feversham began to lay out various toilet accessories, but presently, when the gallery door closed behind Beatriz, she walked to the table near the plate-glass window and picked up the book.  It was a morocco-bound edition of Omar’s Rubaiyat, which she had often noticed at the apartment in Vivian Court, yet she studied the title deliberately, and also the frontispiece, before she turned to the pages that enclosed the letter.  But it was natural that, holding both her brother’s and Beatriz Weatherbee’s interests so at heart, her scruples should be finally dispelled, and she laid the volume face down, to keep the place, while she read the night nurse’s unclinical report.  After that she went to the box of violets in the sleeping-porch and found Tisdale’s message, and she had slipped the card carefully back and stood looking meditatively off through the open casement when her sister entered from the gallery.  At the same time Mrs. Weatherbee appeared on the path above the pergola.  But she had not escaped to the solitude she so evidently had desired, for Foster accompanied her.  When they stopped to look down on the villa and the little cove where the Aquila rocked at her moorings, Marcia waved her hand gaily, then turned to the brilliant room.

Elizabeth met her at the threshold.  “What has sent Beatriz out in this weather?” she asked.

“Why, you see,”—­Marcia answered with a little backward gesture to the figures on the slope,—­“since this is Stuart Foster’s first visit to the villa, he must be personally conducted through the park.”

“She tried her best to discourage him.  They were standing at the side entrance when I came through the dining-room.  She warned him first impressions were everything and that it would be blowing a gale at the observatory; besides, if Frederic was waiting, she would not be responsible.”

“But, ‘come what will, what may’”—­and meeting her sister’s look, Marcia’s eyes gathered brilliancy—­“the man must have his hour.”

“That is what he told her.  He said the syndicate had had his time and brains, he might as well add his soul, for three months steady, and now he was entitled to his hour.  I wonder—­” Elizabeth’s even voice wavered—­“Do you think she will refuse him?”

“I haven’t a doubt.”  And Marcia crossed to the dressing-table and began to remove the shell pins from her glossy black hair.

“She seemed so changed,” pursued Elizabeth following.  “So, well, anxious, depressed, and you know how gay she was at the time the Aquila came.  And I happened to be near them when we started up-stairs.  It was plain she was glad to see him.  But he gave her a package that had been forwarded from Vivian Court.  There was a letter; it may have been from Lucky Banks.”

Marcia was silent.  She lifted her brush and swept it the length of her unbound hair.