Twenty minutes later, when Laura came out and went downstairs, a fine straight figure in her black evening gown, the Sieur de Marsac—­that hard-bitten Huguenot, whose middle-aged shabbiness was but the outward and deceptive seeming of the longest head and the best sword in France—­emerged cautiously from the passageway and stood listening until her footsteps were heard descending the front stairs.  Nevertheless, the most painstaking search of her room, a search as systematic as it was feverish, failed to reveal where she had hidden the book.

He returned wearily to the porch.

A prophet has always been supposed to take some pleasure, perhaps morbid, in seeing his predictions fulfilled; and it may have been a consolation to the gloomy heart of Hedrick, sorely injured by Laura’s offensive care of her treasure, to find the grouping upon the porch as he had foretold:  Cora and Mr. Corliss sitting a little aloof from the others, far enough to permit their holding an indistinct and murmurous conversation of their own.  Their sequestration, even by so short a distance, gave them an appearance of intimacy which probably accounted for the rather absent greeting bestowed by Mr. Lindley upon the son of the house, who met him with some favour.

This Richard Lindley was a thin, friendly looking young man with a pleasing, old-fashioned face which suggested that if he were minded to be portrayed it should be by the daguerreotype, and that a high, black stock would have been more suitable to him than his businesslike, modern neck-gear.  He had fine eyes, which seemed habitually concerned with faraway things, though when he looked at Cora they sparkled; however, it cannot be said that the sparkling continued at its brightest when his glance wandered (as it not infrequently did this evening) from her lovely head to the rose in Mr. Corliss’s white coat.

Hedrick, resuming a position upon the top step between the two groups, found the conversation of the larger annoying because it prevented him from hearing that of the smaller.  It was carried on for the greater part by his mother and Mr. Trumble; Laura sat silent between these two; and Lindley’s mood was obviously contemplative.  Mr. Wade Trumble, twenty-six, small, earnest, and already beginning to lose his hair, was talkative enough.

He was one of those people who are so continuously aggressive that they are negligible.  “What’s the matter here?  Nobody pays any attention to me.  I’M important!” He might have had that legend engraved on his card, it spoke from everything else that was his:  face, voice, gesture—­even from his clothes, for they also clamoured for attention without receiving it.  Worn by another man, their extravagance of shape and shade might have advertised a self-sacrificing effort for the picturesque; but upon Mr. Trumble they paradoxically confirmed an impression that he was well off and close.  Certainly this was the impression confirmed in the mind of the shrewdest