Jesse's car looming suddenly upon her, instantly dissolved Louise's
happy absorption and aroused within her the foreboding that she was upon
the threshold of something sinister; and the premonition caused her to
become physically and mentally tense as she ascended the steps.
The impact of the hall's stream of light slightly blinded and confused
her as she entered; but she very soon discerned Jesse and Judd standing
before the wide, brassy fireplace. Both were in shaggy automobile coats
and plainly were about to leave the house. Judd, his burnished bald pate
mottledly rosy from the heat of the blazing logs, was standing with his
back to the fire, his hands thrust in the greatcoat pockets, his heavy
under-shot jaw working upon an imaginary cud. Jesse, towering over the
other man, but his own increasing over-bulkiness made more manifest by
his bulging coat of fur, was the first to see Louise, who, with an
inclination of the head, was for passing them to gain the stairs.
Neither Jesse nor Judd intended that this should be. The two had dined
together. The blitheness of their humor, therefore, contained also a
seasoning of carelessness.
Without the least movement of his grotesquely-paunched body, Judd turned
his head sidewise and viewed Louise quizzically through his sharp,
red-rimmed, oddly small eyes.
"Evening--er--daughter," he said to her in an experimental but
sufficiently matter-of-fact tone.
The greeting sounded so incredible that Louise, coming to a sudden halt,
rested her hands on the back of a chair and stared curiously at him
without a word. She felt very cold, in spite of the excessive heat of
the hall; but she was amazed quite beyond the power of speech. While
thus she stood, staring puzzledly at Judd, Jesse faced her, and,
bringing his heels together with a click, made her a low bow accompanied
by a sweeping cross-wise gesture with his cap of fur. It is a dangerous
thing for a man to attempt the grand manner unless he is very sure of
his practice or at least of the indulgence of his gallery. Louise,
startled as she was, could not fail to notice the inadequacy of his
attempt.
"Glad I haven't missed you, after all, Lou--Miss Treharne," said Jesse,
catching himself before he had quite finished addressing her by her
first name. His tone was grossly familiar; and Louise, merely glancing
at him, saw that the question that was always in his eyes when he
looked at her now was made more searching and persistent by his
potations. "I've been dallying a-purpose. I came to offer you the use of
my box for 'Pelleas and Melisande'--it's being done at the Manhattan
tonight for the first time here, of course you know. They're repeating
it Friday night, though. Mary Garden's a dream in it, they say--she's a
dream in any old thing--or hardly anything, when it comes to that," and
he laughed boldly at the suggestiveness of the remark. "The box is yours
for Friday night. May I hope to join----"
Louise, as he spoke, had been steadying herself to make reply. Now she
raised a hand for him to desist. The gesture was simple, but he obeyed
the implied command. Perhaps it was the picture that she made in her
anger that warned him. She stood straight, shoulders back, head up, eyes
gazing unflinchingly into his; a moving figure of womanly dauntlessness,
had there been eyes there thus to appraise her attitude.
"Mr. Jesse," she said in a clear tone, picking her words with a cutting
deliberation, "you are not, I have heard, deficient in intelligence. A
very short time ago you had the hardihood to proffer me the use of one
of your cars. I declined for the same reason that I now repeat in
refusing your proffer of the use of your opera box. There is no
imaginable reason why I should accept such favors at your hands. I told
you that before. And you knew it before I told you. My acquaintanceship
with you is merely casual. But, since you force me to it by disregarding
what I said before, permit me to say now, explicitly and I hope finally,
that I am not conscious of the least desire to become further acquainted
with you."
Judd choked on a gloatful cough. While Louise had been speaking he had
been grinning malevolently at Jesse, the grin saying, as plainly as
words: "Well, I was right, wasn't I? You're properly shrivelled, aren't
you?"
Jesse smiled chagrinedly and, as he imagined, conciliatingly. But he
evaded her direct gaze, and his wholly unconvincing assumption of the
grand manner had quite departed. He was not, however, appreciably
disturbed. Jesse had a habit of discounting such setbacks in advance.
The stock market and women required deft manipulation, he considered,
and his fame as a manipulator was established. The citadel, finally
scaled, would be the more inviting for the difficulty of the
besiegement. He entertained no doubts as to the outcome. In the meantime
Louise could enjoy her schoolgirl heroics. He was not unfamiliar with
that sort of thing. But in time they all sensed the glamour of the
advantages he so well knew how to dangle before them. These thoughts
danced agreeably before Jesse's mental vision even at the moment when
he felt himself, with no sense of degradation, to be the target of
Louise's scorn.
"Well, I am sorry, Miss Treharne, that you still seem to misunderstand
me," said Jesse, attempting the tone of one whose sorrow overtops his
mortification.
"It is because I do understand you that I speak as I do," replied Louise
with perfect self-possession. Judd choked again in the gleefulness of
his vindication and Jesse shot him a malignant glance. Then and there
Jesse began to outline a little plan whereby, by means of "market"
pressure, he calculated that he could promptly and effectually change
Judd's attitude.
"I prefer to believe, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, "that you are
indisposed and that upon reflection you will be sorry that----"
"I am perfectly well," interposed Louise in a tone of cold finality,
"and I shall not be sorry." Then she passed up the stairs to her
mother's apartments.
"Now will you be good!" broke out Judd, chuckling vindictively, when she
had gone. "Say, Jesse, I wonder if you feel so much like a clipped and
trimmed Lothario as you look?"
Jesse, his mask off, growled something inarticulate by way of reply.
Then: "Are you for the club?" he asked Judd. He decided that he might
as well test the strength of the screws upon Judd at once. They went out
together.
* * * * *
Mrs. Treharne, dressed for a restaurant supper party that was to
assemble at midnight, was reading, with the wistfulness of one debarred,
the "society news" in a chattery and generally wrong weekly publication
when Louise entered her sitting room. She was wonderfully coiffured, and
encased in a _décolletté_ dress that somewhat too liberately exploited
the chisellings of her still milky arms and shoulders. She stiffened
slightly in her chair at the sight of Louise; and the dimplings which
had been creasing her plastic face in her enjoyment of the publication's
malevolent gossip gave way to the expression of peevishness with which
her daughter was becoming all too well acquainted.
"Well, my dear," she started to say as Louise, in whose eyes the embers
of the wrath Jesse's words had aroused still slumbered, "I must say that
you have a cool way of walking off and----"
"No reproaches just now, mother, please," interposed Louise, sinking
wearily into a chair. "I never had a happier day until, returning
here----"
She paused, passing a hand before her eyes. She was loth to enter upon
the topic of Judd and Jesse with her mother. But Mrs. Treharne, looking
at her more closely, saw her perturbation.
"Oh, you met Mr. Judd and Mr. Jesse as you came in?" she asked, a note
of slightly worried curiosity in her tone. "Were they----?" She broke
off. "Men are men, my dear," she resumed, placatingly. "They had been
dining--I noticed that. But of course they said nothing to----"
"Your business adviser," said Louise--she could not bring herself to
mention Judd's name--"greeted me as 'daughter.' I remember now that I
was too much startled to tell him that he must not repeat that."
"Tush, Louise--a slip of the tongue, of course," said Mrs. Treharne,
appeasingly. Privately, however, she already began to contrive the
things she intended to say to Judd on the morrow. "And Mr. Jesse--did
he----"
"Mr. Jesse," interposed Louise, "caught himself as he was about to
address me as Louise. He offered me the use of his box at the opera.
Several days ago--I was too chagrined to tell you--he insisted upon my
accepting the use of one of his automobiles. I hope I made it plain to
him tonight--and I tried hard enough to make it plain to him
before--that there is not the remotest chance that I shall ever accept
his sinister civilities."
"Why 'sinister,' Louise?" put Mrs. Treharne, bridling. "How can you
possibly put such a construction upon it when one of my friends
generously extends to you courtesies that are commonly and with perfect
propriety accepted by----"
Louise sighed wearily and held up a pleading hand.
"Don't ask me such a question--please, mother," she entreated. "You
don't know how the subject revolts me."
"But, my dear," her mother persisted, "what is it that you have against
Mr. Jesse? I am entitled to know."
"I am not sufficiently interested in the man to have anything against
him," replied Louise. "Is it not enough that I loathe him?"
"No, Louise, it is not enough," pronounced her mother, plainly ready for
argument on the subject. "You are too young a woman to be forming
prejudices or leaping to conclusions. What do you know about Mr. Jesse
that has caused you to form such an opinion of him?"
Louise hesitated. Her intimacy with her mother had never been very
great. There had never been any plain talk, or even mother-and-daughter
confidences, between them. The theme as she had said, was revolting to
her. But her mother deliberately chose to remain on that ground. There
was no path around the point her mother dwelt upon. Louise entertained
no thought of evading it.
"Mother," she said, leaning forward in her earnestness, "it is natural
enough, I know, that you still regard me as a child. But, before I
answer your question, are you willing to grant, at least for the time,
that I am a woman?"
"Don't be so unmitigatedly solemn about it, Louise," demurred her
mother, evasively. "My question was simple enough."
"Simple enough to put, but not so simple for me to answer," was Louise's
quiet reply. "But I shall answer it nevertheless. The reason, then, why
I do not intend to have any further contact with Langdon Jesse is that
he is one of the most notorious libertines in New York; a man who
regards women from a single angle--as his prey. Everybody seems to know
that, mother, except you: and you don't know it, do you?" There was a
pathos in the eagerness with which the girl asked the question; it spoke
of a dim hope she yet had that perhaps, after all, her mother did not
know about Langdon Jesse. Her mother's harsh, dodging reply quickly
dashed that hope.
"Who has been telling you such scandalous things, child?" Mrs. Treharne
demanded. "Laura Stedham?"
"You must not ask me that question," replied Louise, quietly firm. "But
if nobody had told me about Langdon Jesse--and I shall not deny that I
was told--I am sure my instinct would have taught me to suspect him of
being--precisely what he is."
Mrs. Treharne shook her head dismally.
"It is exactly as I feared it would be, Louise," she said, sighing
drearily. "You are narrow, restricted, pent-in; you haven't even a
symptom of bigness of view; your horizon is no wider than the room in
which you happen to be. I always feared they would make a prude of you.
Now I see that my forebodings were right."
Louise, very much wrought upon, rose rather unsteadily and walked over
to her mother's chair.
"You repel me a little, mother," she said in a low tone. "It hurts me to
say that: but it is the truth. If I am a prude, then I am unconscious of
it. It may be that I don't know your definition of the word." She paused
and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is
to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman,
then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one
must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like
Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."
She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to
wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs,
they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her
position.
"Louise," she asked, hoarsely, moistening her dry lips, "are you saying
these--these stinging things with the deliberate purpose of reflecting
upon your mother?"
Addressed to anybody else but Louise, the question would have been
absurd in the opening it afforded.
"I should hate to have you think that," replied Louise, flushing hotly
and taking her mother's hands. "You don't think such a thing, do you?"
"I don't know what to think," said her mother, taking the martyred tone,
"when you say such horrid things. I never heard you say such--such
flaying things before. I can't think what is coming over you."
"I am very lonesome, for one thing," said Louise, looking at her mother
through suffused eyes. "I see so little of you. Perhaps I become moody.
But I never mean, never meant, to say anything to hurt you, dear."
"But you see enough, if not too much, of--of others, Louise," put in her
mother, slightly mollified. "You have been with Laura ever since early
this morning?"
"Yes; with Laura--and another," replied Louise, unfailingly candid.
"Another?" said Mrs. Treharne, querulously. "Whom do you mean?"
"Mr. John Blythe," replied Louise, coloring.
"John Blythe?" said her mother, wonderingly. "You were with Laura and
John Blythe? So that is the direction of the wind? Laura is trying
to----" She broke off when she saw the expression of pain on her
daughter's face.
"Please don't say that," said Louise, her face and forehead a vivid
crimson. "I have often met Mr. Blythe at Laura's. I couldn't begin to
tell you how I esteem him. And, mother, he is to be my guardian." She
had meant to tell her mother that at a more fitting time; but, since
Blythe's name had come up, she discerned that there could be no excuse
for a postponement of the revelation.
Mrs. Treharne gazed at her daughter with mouth agape. When she finally
spoke her words were almost inarticulate.
"Your guardian?" she gasped. "John Blythe is to be your guardian? At
whose direction? Upon whose application?"
"My father's, mother."
"But are you sure that you are not being tricked--that----"
"John Blythe is not the man to trick anybody, dear--everybody, of
course, knows that," said Louise, very prompt to a defense in that
quarter. "Moreover, I saw the letters from my father. One of them is to
me. So there is no mistake about it."
"What does your father say in his letter?" asked Mrs. Treharne,
suspiciously. "Does he mention me? say anything to my detriment?"
"Nothing of that sort, mother," replied Louise, disliking exceedingly
the drift of the conversation. "Mr. Blythe's guardianship is to be
largely a matter of form. I--I am glad the arrangement has been made.
There are times when I feel that I need guidance. You are so busy and I
so much dislike to worry you. Often, since I came home, I've found
myself wishing that I had a brother." She stopped, her voice faltering.
Mrs. Treharne started slightly, swept by the thought of how often she
had wished that Louise herself had been a son. Now, for the moment, she
repented that thought; the dignity and strength of her daughter were
making their appeal to her. She had her periods of fairness, and she
could not throttle her consciousness of the wretchedness of Louise's
position under that roof nor subdue the accusing inner voice that held
her solely responsible for it. She trembled with indignation when she
remembered that Judd had dared to address Louise as "daughter." She
raged at herself for not possessing the strength to cast the Judd
incubus from her once and forever. And she ended, as usual, by giving
way to an effusion of dismal tears and by promising herself that "some
time--some day----"
Louise went to bed with a disturbed mind. She was trying not to face
the indubitable fact that her mother was proving herself but a reed to
lean upon. Then her drowsy thoughts wandered to the fire-lit dining-room
of the serene old house in the country in and around which she had spent
a day marked by a sort of placid happiness which she could not quite
analyze; and her last thought, before succumbing to unquiet dreams based
upon the events at the end of the day, were of a rugged, kindly-faced
man quietly watching her as she read her father's letter by the
flickering light of the droning logs.
* * * * *
Judd, still chuckling viciously, continued to taunt the rebuked but by
no means cast-down Jesse after the two had got into Jesse's car.
"Not saying much, are you, old top?" he gurgled joyously as the car
throbbed away from the curb. "Well, I don't blame you. Not, of course,
that I didn't give you fair warning. I told you you'd be frozen stiff if
you tried on any of your Don Juanish airs and graces in that quarter.
But don't take it to heart--don't grieve over it. You'll thaw out again
in time. Right now I wouldn't dare take a chance on touching you for
fear one of your arms or something'd drop off. But you'll thaw--you'll
thaw," and he squirmed and wabbled around in his seat in the excess of
his mirth.
Jesse, gnawing on an unlighted cigar as was his wont when temporarily
eclipsed or engaged in blocking out a campaign, listened in silence.
When it becomes the unfailing habit of a man to enjoy the last laugh he
learns to pay little heed to the too-previous chirrupings of those over
whom he feels confident of eventually triumphing. So he permitted Judd
to enjoy himself. When the chuckles of his companion gradually ceased,
however, he said, drily enough:
"To all intents and purposes she's a dependent of yours, isn't she?"
Judd parried the question. He was indifferent enough as to what might
happen to Louise Treharne: he regarded her as an interloper, and he was
disgruntled over her studiously aloof treatment of him. But it had
become a habit with him to parry Jesse's questions since the occasion
when his over-expansiveness in replying to a few seemingly innocent and
unmeditated questions from Jesse had resulted in the sound "market"
trouncing which his one-time pupil had inflicted upon him.
"What the devil difference does it make?" was Judd's reply. "She has
your number all right, and that's all you need to know, isn't it?" and
he chuckled again.
Jesse waited again until Judd's glee had subsided, then resumed.
"She has to look to you to make provision for her needs--clothes, hats,
ribbons, furbelows, that sort of thing--doesn't she?" he inquired with
the coolness of one who does not mean to be rebuffed.
"Oh, forget it," said Judd, a little grumpily now. "Don't try to pin me,
Jesse. I don't spout about these things. She's living under one of my
roofs, is a member of one of my households. And she regards you
as--well, as a considerably-drowned water-bug. Why don't you let it go
at that? There are more women in the world than there are red ants or
railroad ties. Can't you take your medicine--stand for the defeat?"
"Not in this particular case," was Jesse's perfectly frank reply; he
could be frank when there was no possibility of a "come-back." "What's
more, I don't intend to. Just make up your mind to that, will you?"
"Oho!" said Judd, struck by the intentional rawness which Jesse had put
into his last phrase. "That's the tune, is it?"
"That house of yours on the Drive isn't the place for the young woman,"
said Jesse. Judd knew that he wasn't assuming any virtuous strain, but
merely leading up to a point. "You ought to know that--as the father of
a family."
"You're becoming confoundedly erect in your ideas, aren't you?" snorted
Judd. "And I've told you before that I won't have you dabbling in my
private affairs. Just cut out your harpings, in this connection, upon
my family and all of that sort of thing, understand?"
"Damn your private affairs," said Jesse, quietly, but with a note of
meaningfulness in his tone that caused Judd to sit up and take immediate
notice. "I am no more interested in your private affairs than I am in
the transactions of the Congo Missionary Society. But I repeat that
your--er--that Mrs. Treharne's daughter doesn't belong under that
Riverside Drive roof. Do you understand me?"
"No," said Judd, "I don't," nor did he. But he no longer chuckled.
"I think you've told me several times," Jesse went on calmly, "that the
young woman flaunts you?"
Judd made some inarticulate reply which Jesse took for an affirmative.
"That being the case," inquired Jesse, "why do you keep her around the
place?"
"What's your idea--that I should turn her into the street?" asked Judd,
gradually getting a hold on Jesse's thread.
"Oh, she wouldn't be in the street very long," said Jesse with
significant emphasis. "But, since on your own say-so she scarcely even
nods to you, and you are paying the freight, what's the answer? Doesn't
she know that she's dependent upon you?"
"How the devil could she help knowing it?" broke out Judd impatiently.
"She has eyes and what belongs to her by way of brains, I suppose."
"Well," said Jesse, "if she cuts in on your--your game, and is such a
nuisance to you, why don't you exert your authority--the authority of
the provider--and----" He hesitated.
"And what?" inquired Judd, proddingly.
"Make provision for her--not necessarily luxurious provision--under some
other roof?" said Jesse. "In a modest little apartment, for example,
with just the necessaries and that sort of thing. That would alter her
demeanor toward you--and toward others. Once they've enjoyed the gewgaws
of life the other thing is a come-down and they feel the sordid misery
of it."
Judd studied.
"You're a deep sort of a reprobate, Jesse," he said, musingly, after a
pause. "I don't profess to be able to plumb some features of your
scoundrelism, and yet I've never been accused of being uncommonly dense.
How the devil would my planting the young woman in a miserable little
six-by-eight flat help your case?"
"That," coolly replied Jesse, "is my affair; but you exhibit your
denseness, at that, in asking such a fool question. It wouldn't take her
long to begin to pine for the light and laughter and lavishness of life
after she'd had a taste of the miserable little six-by-eight flat as
you call it, would it?"
"And when she did begin to pine that's where you'd come in, eh?" said
Judd. "Yes, it was pretty thick of me not to catch your drift, I'll
admit. But I guess I'll keep out of it. You can conduct your own damned
round-ups. You've got your nerve with you to ask me to figure in any
such a dirty subtle scheme as that, haven't you?" He spoke more in
resentment of Jesse's overbearing tone than from any profound sense of
the contemptibleness of Jesse's suggestion.
Jesse lit his cigar and said nothing for a while. Then, puffing hard so
that the glow of his cigar lit up his stolid waxy face, he said:
"I hear you're carrying a pretty nifty line of cotton, Judd, and that
you're still buying. Waiting for cotton to touch sixteen cents, eh?"
Judd cocked his ears.
"Well," he said, moistening his lips, "I haven't got anything on you.
You're carrying ten bales when I'm only carrying one."
"Is that so?" lied Jesse with perfect serenity. "Well, you're entitled
to have your dream out, of course. But it so happens that I am not
carrying even one bale."
Judd sat up straight in his seat.
"Well?" he asked, huskily.
"Well, what?" asked Jesse.
"What are you shooting at?" inquired Judd. "Do you mean to say you're
going to take the bear end of it?"
"I don't mean to say anything of the sort," replied Jesse. "And you
don't suppose I'd go around placarding the fact if that was my
intention, do you? I'm merely out of the market for the present, that's
all. But you're in, eh, and waiting for sixteen cent cotton?"
The screws were working all right. Jesse saw that. It was chilly in the
automobile, but Judd was mopping a damp brow.
"If I ever do break into that market," Jesse went on clinchingly but in
the same even tone he had been using, "you want to watch my smoke.
That's all."
Judd, in a cold tremor, resolved to unload his line of cotton as soon as
the market opened on the morrow. Also he decided that it wouldn't be any
impolitic thing for him to placate Jesse in the immediate meanwhile.
"Well, if I have been dense, I'm not now," he said, reflectively. "I
understand you all right."
"I thought you would," said Jesse, tossing his cigar out of the car
window.
* * * * *
Despite her natural reserve and the reticence, born of keen humiliation,
which she maintained in respect of her mother's affairs, Louise,
feeling the need of an experienced woman's counsel, gave to Laura
Stedham, her one woman friend in need, a somewhat guarded account of her
meeting with Jesse and Judd upon her return from the day in the country.
Laura listened to the story in a sort of silent rage. She was not a
woman to rant, and even if she had been, the recital that Louise gave
her, with the wretched details which Laura could guess at, of her
gradual hemming in at the Riverside Drive house, filled the other woman
with a sense of anger and disgust beyond the mere power of words. Louise
had not previously told Laura of Langdon's proffering her the use of an
automobile; she feared that Laura's wrath and alarm over that would be
directed against her mother for having made such a situation possible;
and her loyalty to her mother never wavered.
At the close of her story, which she gave to Laura in a quiet, rather
hopeless way that the older woman found pathetic to a degree, Louise, in
a moment of inadvertence, let fall how Judd had greeted her as
"daughter." Laura flared at that. But she held herself in, and she asked
Louise, quietly enough:
"My dear, there is one thing that I want to ask you. I hope you won't
think me intrusive for asking it. It is this: Just why are you remaining
at that house? You know the--the circumstances there. I am not trying to
influence you. But I want you to tell me just why, since you cannot
change the conditions, you deem it necessary to go on living there?"
Louise replied without hesitation.
"I don't lose hope that I may be able to change the conditions some
time, dear," she replied. "There would be no use in my staying with my
mother if I did not possess that hope."
"But," asked Laura, not pressingly, but with a grave, interested
earnestness, "don't you think your chance to change the conditions is
almost negligible? Just how can you possibly expect such a change ever
to come about?"
"I am hoping," Louise answered bravely, but coloring, "that, if I stay
on with my mother, sooner or later she will become ash----"; she could
not finish the word "ashamed;"----"she will come to a realization of
herself," she took up the thread, "of what the conditions in which she
lives mean; of what, eventually, they must bring her to, and bring me
to, also. Often I think that she doesn't view it as I do--as we do. She
is drifting. She told me that she was. She has lost her moorings. I want
to bring her back. I am the only one who could bring her back, am I not?
And I can't leave her as long as there is a chance to do that."
"But your own life, dear?" interposed Laura. "You must consider that,
you know. You are a very young woman. There is no reason why you should
be dragged down."
"I shall not be," replied Louise. "And, if my mother is to be dragged
down, if she is to continue in this way, of what use would my life ever
be to me? I never could be happy with her in such surroundings, could I?
There is only one thing for me to do, dear; stay with her until she sees
it all. I know that she will understand sooner or later. She can't help
it. She's bound to--to change. I want to help her. I don't ever say
anything to her, of course. It would be impossible for me to do that.
But she isn't happy as she is now. My mother and I will have a dear,
cosy, happy life together yet, Laura, never fear."
Laura pretended that some pictures on a mantel needed straightening in
order to hide her suffused eyes.
"All the same, Louise," she said, resuming her seat after a little
while, "Mr. Blythe is entitled to know these things that you have told
me. And you should have the benefit of his advice. He not only is your
guardian, but he is a man--a regular man--and your--oh, well, I do not
need to say that he is your friend, do I?" smiling.
"I meant to tell him," replied Louise, turning to gaze out of the
window.
"Oh, you did, dear?" said Laura, teasingly. "Then my advising you to
tell him was superfluous, wasn't it? I wonder why you decided to tell
him, Louise?"
"Because----" Louise started to reply. But she did not finish, for at
that instant John Blythe, in riding dress, walked into the room.