Gaites found some notable changes in the hotel at Lower Merritt since he
had last sojourned there. It no longer called itself a Hotel, but an
Inn, and it had a brand-new old-fashioned swinging sign before its door;
its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the
ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much
grayer than it naturally ought. Within it was equipped for electric
lighting; and there was a low-browed æsthetic parlor, where, when Gaites
arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra,
consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the
closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a
self-righteous olive-green; it was thoroughly netted against the flies,
which used to roost in myriads on the cut-paper around the tops of the
pillars, and a college-student head waiter ushered Gaites through the
gloom to his place with a warning and hushing hand which made him feel
as if he were being shown to a pew during prayers.
He escaped as soon as possible from the refection which, from the soup
to the ice-cream, had hardly grown lukewarm, and went out to walk by a
way that he knew well, and which had for him now a romantically pathetic
interest. It was, of course, the way past the Desmond cottage, which,
when he came in sight of it round the shoulder of upland where it stood,
was curiously strange, curiously familiar. It needed painting badly, and
the grounds had a sadly neglected air. The naked legs of little girls no
longer twinkled over the lawn, which was grown neglectedly up to
low-bush blackberries.
Gaites hurried past with a lump in his throat, and returned by another
road to the Inn, where his long ramble ended just as the dining-room
doors were opened behind their nettings for supper. At this cheerfuler
moment he found the head waiter much more conversible than at the hour
of his retarded dinner, and Gaites made talk with him, as the young
follow lingered beside his chair, with one eye on the door for the
behoof of other guests.
Gaites said he had found great changes in Lower Merritt since he had
been there some years before, and he artfully led the talk up to the
Desmonds. The head waiter was rather vague about their past; but he was
distinct enough about their present, and said the young ladies happened
all to be at home. "I don't know," he added, "whether you noticed our
lady orchestra when you came in to dinner to-day?"
"Yes, I did," said Gaites. "I was very much interested. I thought they
played charmingly, and I was sorry that I got in only for the close of
the last piece."
"Well," the head waiter consoled him, "you'll have a chance to hear them
again to-night; they're going to play for the hop. I don't know," he
added again, "whether you noticed the lady at the piano."
"I noticed that she had a pretty head, which she carried gracefully, but
it was against the window, and I couldn't make out the face."
"That," said the head waiter, with pride either in the fact or for the
effect it must produce, "was Miss Phyllis Desmond."