Excerpt
CHAPTER IAN OLD HOUSE
There are certain old houses in New York City built of rose-colored brick and white stone which face Washington Square.
On this morning in early winter a light snow covered the ground and clung to the bare branches of the shrubs and trees.
In a drawing-room of one of the old houses a young girl was moving quietly about at work. She was alone and the room was almost entirely dismantled, the pictures having been taken down from the walls, the decorations stored away and the furniture protected by linen covers.
The girl herself was wearing an odd costume, a long frock made like a peasant’s smock with an insignia of two crossed logs and a flame embroidered upon one sleeve. With her dark eyes, her dark, rather coarse hair, which she wore parted in the middle over a low forehead, and her white, unusually colorless skin, she suggested a foreigner. Nevertheless, although her mother and father were born in Russia, Vera Lagerloff was not a foreigner. However, at this moment she was talking quietly to herself in a foreign tongue, yet the language she was making an attempt to practice was French and not Russian. Since the entry of the United States into the world war, New York City had been exchanging peoples as well as material supplies with her Allies to so large an extent that one language was no longer sufficient even for the requirements of one’s own country.
Finally, still reciting her broken sentences almost as if she were rehearsing a part in a play, Vera walked over to a front window and stood gazing expectantly out into the Square as if she were looking for some one.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon and the neighborhood was almost deserted. In the paths beyond the Washington Arch a few children were playing. Now and then an occasional man or woman passed along the street, to vanish into a house or apartment building.
A few taxis and private cars rolled by, but not one made even a pretence of stopping before the rose-colored brick house.
After about five minutes of waiting, sighing and then, smiling at her own folly, the girl turned away and began slowly to climb up the old colonial stairs leading to the second floor.
“When will human beings cease demanding the impossible?” she asked of herself, yet speaking aloud. “I know that Mrs. Burton and Bettina cannot arrive for another half hour, nevertheless I am wasting both time and energy watching for their appearance.”
During the past month Vera Lagerloff had been the guest of Mrs. Richard Burton in her New York home. Together they had been closing the house for an indefinite period and making their final arrangements for sailing for France. Within a few days the American Sunrise Camp Fire unit, with Mrs. Burton as their guardian, was to set sail to help with the work of reclamation in the devastated area of France and also to establish the first group of Camp Fire girls ever recognized upon French soil.
Since their summer “Behind the Lines” in southern California, Vera had been studying with these two purposes in mind.
In the front of the house on the second floor Mrs. Burton’s private sitting-room was to be left undisturbed until the day of her departure, and it was toward this room Vera was making her way.
Except for the two servants, man and wife, engaged only a short time before, who were presumably busy downstairs, she supposed herself alone.
Now as she approached the sitting-room, through the open door she caught sight of the blue and silver of the walls, a pair of old blue curtains and a tea-table decorated with a tea-service and a blue bowl of yellow jonquils....