beth can do
everything for me."

"Much better than Celeste," she agreed. "And while you are busy, I shall
go for a bracing little walk."

"A walk?" echoed Marcia in astonishment. "Why, it's storming. Hear that!"

Another burst of hail struck the window. Mrs. Weatherbee turned,
listening, and so avoiding Marcia's penetrating eyes, dropped her hand
from her own. "I have my raincoat and cap," she said, "and a smart brush
with the wind will clear my head of cobwebs."

With this she hurriedly smoothed the letter and laid it between the pages
of a book; lifting the violets from the table, she carried them out of the
steam-heated apartment to the coolness of the sleeping-porch. Mrs.
Feversham followed to the inner room and stood watching her through the
open door.

"Violets!" she exclaimed. "At Christmas! From wherever did they come?"

"From Hollywood Gardens," she responded almost eagerly. "Isn't it
marvelous how they make the out-of-season flowers bloom? But this flurry
of hail is the end of the storm, Marcia; the clouds are breaking, and it
is light enough to see the path above the pergola. I shall have time to go
as far as the observatory."

Before she finished speaking, she was back in the room and hurrying on her
raincoat. Mrs. Feversham began to lay out various toilet accessories, but
presently, when the gallery door closed behind Beatriz, she walked to the
table near the plate-glass window and picked up the book. It was a
morocco-bound edition of Omar's _Rubaiyat_, which she had often noticed at
the apartment in Vivian Court, yet she studied the title deliberately, and
also the frontispiece, before she turned to the pages that enclosed the
letter. But it was natural that, holding both her brother's and Beatriz
Weatherbee's interests so at heart, her scruples should be finally
dispelled, and she laid the volume face down, to keep the place, while she
read the night nurse's unclinical report. After that she went to the box
of violets in the sleeping-porch and found Tisdale's message, and she had
slipped the card carefully back and stood looking meditatively off through
the open casement when her sister entered from the gallery. At the same
time Mrs. Weatherbee appeared on the path above the pergola. But she had
not escaped to the solitude she so evidently had desired, for Foster
accompanied her. When they stopped to look down on the villa and the
little cove where the _Aquila_ rocked at her moorings, Marcia waved