About a week after the fair I went one afternoon to call on Mrs. Durant, and found Cranch just leaving. His greeting, as he hurried by, was curt and almost hostile, and his handsome countenance so disturbed and pale that I hardly recognized him. I was sure there could be nothing personal in his manner; we had always been on good terms, and, next to Mrs. Durant, I suppose I was his nearest friend at Harpledon — if ever one could be said to get near Waldo Cranch! After he had passed me I stood hesitating at Mrs. Durant’s open door — front doors at Harpledon were always open in those friendly days, except, by the way, Cranch’s own, which the stern Catherine kept chained and bolted. Since meeting me could not have been the cause of his anger, it might have been excited by something which had passed between Mrs. Durant and himself; and if that were so, my call was probably inopportune. I decided not to go in, and was turning away when I heard hurried steps, and Mrs. Durant’s voice. “Waldo!” she said.

I suppose I had always assumed that she called him so; yet the familiar appellation startled me, and made me feel more than ever in the way. None of us had ever given Cranch his Christian name.

Mrs. Durant checked her steps, perceiving that the back in the doorway was not Cranch’s but mine. “Oh, do come in,” she murmured, with an attempt at ease.

In the little drawing-room I turned and looked at her. She, too, was visibly disturbed; not angry, as he had been, but showing, on her white face and reddened lids, the pained reflection of his anger. Was it against her, then, that he had manifested it? Probably she guessed my thought, or felt her appearance needed to be explained, for she added quickly: “Mr. Cranch has just gone. Did he speak to you?”

“No. He seemed in a great hurry.”

“Yes . . . I wanted to beg him to come back . . . to try to quiet him . . . ”

She saw my bewilderment, and picked up a copy of an illustrated magazine which had been tossed on the sofa. “It’s that — ” she said.

The pages fell apart at an article entitled: “Colonial Harpledon,” the greater part of which was taken up by a series of clever sketches signed by the Boston architect whom she had brought to Cranch’s a few months earlier.

Of the six or seven drawings, four were devoted to the Cranch house. One represented the facade and its pillared gates, a second the garden front with the windowless side of the wing, the third a corner of the box garden surrounding the Chinese summer-house; while the fourth, a full-page drawing, was entitled: “The back of the slaves’ quarters and service-court: quaint window-grouping.”

On that picture the magazine had opened; it was evidently the one which had been the subject of discussion between my hostess and her visitor.

“You see . . . you see . . . ” she cried.

“This picture? Well, what of it? I suppose it’s the far side of the wing — the side we’ve never any of us seen.”

“Yes; that’s just it. He’s horribly upset . . . ”

“Upset about what? I heard him tell the architect he could come back some other day and see the wing . . . some day when the maids were not sitting in the court; wasn’t that it?”

She shook her head tragically. “He didn’t mean it. Couldn’t you tell by the sound of his voice that he didn’t?”

Her tragedy airs were beginning to irritate me. “I don’t know that I pay as much attention as all that to the sound of his voice.”

She coloured, and choked back her tears. “I know him so well; I’m always sorry to see him lose his self-control. And then he considers me responsible.”

“You?”

“It was I who took the wretched man there. And of course it was an indiscretion to do that drawing; he was never really authorized to come back. In fact, Mr. Cranch gave orders to Catherine and all the other servants not to let him in if he did.”

“Well —?”

“One of the maids seems to have disobeyed the order; Mr. Cranch imagines she was bribed. He has been staying in Boston, and this morning, on the way back, he saw this magazine at the book-stall at the station. He was so horrified that he brought it to me. He came straight from the train without going home, so he doesn’t yet know how the thing happened.”

“It doesn’t take much to horrify him,” I said, again unable to restrain a faint sneer.

“What’s the harm in the man’s having made that sketch?”

“Harm?” She looked surprised at my lack of insight. “No actual harm, I suppose; but it was very impertinent; and Mr. Cranch resents such liberties intensely. He’s so punctilious.”

“Well, we Americans are not punctilious, and being one himself, he ought to know it by this time.”

She pondered again. “It’s his Spanish blood, I suppose . . . he’s frightfully proud.” As if this were a misfortune, she added: “I’m very sorry for him.”

“So am I, if such trifles upset him.”

Her brows lightened. “Ah, that’s what I tell him — such things are trifles, aren’t they? As I said just now: ‘Your life’s been too fortunate, too prosperous. That’s why you’re so easily put out.’”

“And what did he answer?”

“Oh, it only made him angrier. He said: ‘I never expected that from you’ — that was when he rushed out of the house.” Her tears flowed over, and seeing her so genuinely perturbed I restrained my impatience, and took leave after a few words of sympat............