Excerpt
CHAPTER I.
"There is a courtesy of the heart. Is it akin to love?"—Goethe..
It is the perfection of summer, early June, before the roses have shaken off their sweetness, and Grandon Park is lovely enough to compare with places whose beauty is an accretion of centuries rather than the work of decades. Yet these grand old trees and this bluff, with a strata of rock manifest here and there, are much older than the pretty settlement lying at its base. The quaint house of rough, gray stone, with a tower and a high balcony hung out at irregular intervals, the windows and angles and the curious pointed roof, stamp it as something different from the Swiss villas and cottage ornées at its feet.
Not very near, though; there is a spacious lawn and a wide drive, a grove of trees that can shut out intrusive neighbors to the south, as well as another dense thicket northward. There is the road at a distance on one side, and the broad, beautiful river on the other. Down below, a mile, perhaps, a rocky point juts out into the river, up above another, so this forms a kind of indentation, an exclusive sort of bay for the dwellers therein, and the whole rather aristocratic settlement is put down on the railway map as Grandon Park.
But it is at the stone house on its very brow where the master, Floyd Grandon, is expected home to-day after years of wandering and many changes. In the library his mother and sisters are gathered. It is a favorite place with Gertrude, who spends her days on the sofa reading. Marcia much affects her own "study," up under the eaves, but to-day she is clothed and in her right mind, free from dabs of paint or fingers grimed with charcoal and crayons. Laura is always Laura, a stylish young girl, busy with the strip of an extremely elegant carriage robe, and Mrs. Grandon, a handsome woman past fifty, has a bit of embroidery in her hands. She seems never exactly idle, but now she holds her work and listens, then drops into musing.
"I wonder what can be the matter?" she exclaims presently. "It is full half an hour behind time," looking at her watch.
"Are you in a hurry?" asks a languid voice from the luxurious Turkish lounge.
"Gertrude! How heartless you are! When we have not seen Floyd for seven years!" in a tone of reproach.
"If he were only coming alone——"
"And if we did know whether he is married or not!"
This young, impatient voice is Laura's. Not that it will make any great difference to her.
"We cannot dispossess Floyd," says Marcia, in a queer, caustic tone. "And a new mistress——"
Marcia has a great gift for making people uncomfortable.
"You seem so certain that he has married her," the mother comments in a kind of incredulous impatience.
"Well, he was in love with her before. And now their travelling together, his bringing her here, look wonderfully like it."
"Well, what then? She is rich, handsome, an elegant society woman, and just your age, Gertrude."
That rather stings the pale, listless woman on the lounge, who knows her mother's ambition has been sorely crossed by these single daughters....