The Last September Read Free Page A

large was to intervene. Their life, through which they went forward uncertainly, without the compulsion of tragedy, was a net of small complications. There was the drag of his indecisions, the fine snapping now and then of her minor relinquishments. Her health, his temperament, their varying poverty—they were delayed, deflected. She was ordered abroad for successive winters, to places he could not expect to endure. He came and went without her; going for consolation, of course, to Danielstown. The Naylors sent her out wails, injunctions and declarations. They would never, never be happy till she was with them also!
    So at last Hugo and Francie returned together. And today something—-that break in the trees on the avenue, something unremembered about the face of the house, some intensification of the silence surrounding it, or perhaps simply Lois’s figure standing there on the steps—made the place different.
    Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency now went upstairs together. Francie looked down at the top step to see if the marks were still there—becoming much excited in the course of an argument about Robert Hugh Benson she had waved her candle and scattered a rain of hot grease. But there was a new stair-carpet. Myra looked down also, but ir remember. She had argued  with so many people in twelve years—nowadays she argued about Galsworthy.

    “I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, lowering her voice as they approached the ante-room, “if we found Laurence up here—my nephew. He is with us a good deal, between Oxford. Though I expect it is dull for him. He is not out of doors very much; he is very intellectual. Though, of course he plays tennis.”
    Francie was much relieved, on entering the anteroom, to find that Laurence had gone. “It’s so nice, she said, “the way you have the house full of young people.” She turned to the right instinctively, to her old door.
    “No, this way, Francie, the Blue Room. The rooks on that side of the house disturbed so many people; we’ve changed the rooms round she prefers them.”
    As they came into the Blue Room, Francie saw their two faces reflected in the tall dressing-table glass, with the door swinging behind. Myra’s aged!”, she thought with a shock. Her never seemed to have changed at all.
    She said: “You look wonderful, you know. I couldn’t think when I was ever to see you again, or Richard either.”
    Myra kissed her—a compact, sudden pursing and placing of the lips. It was as though they were meeting again only now. The door swung to with a rush. “It’s been too bad, too bad—not even as if you had been in Canada.”
    The linen of Myra’s sleeve was cool to the touch of the dusty Francie. Myra wore a grey linen dress with embroidered panels, a lace scarf twice round the throat and a green hat dipping in front and trimmed with clover. Her bright grey eyes with very black urgent pupils continued in a deep crease at each outside corner. High on the curve of her cheeks, like petals, bright mauve-pink colour became, within kissing distance, a net of fine delicate veins. Her eyebrows, drawn in a pointed arch, suggested tragic surprise till one saw the arch never flattened, the face beneath never changed from its placid eagerness, its happy dissatisfaction. “ Has she aged?” Francie thought, glancing closely and shyly again as they parted. Yes, she felt something set now in Myra; she was happier, harder.
    Myra receded now that the kiss was over. There was life to go on with, the duty of love and pleasure fully discharged. She moved round the Blue Room, nodded out of a window to someone distant coming out from some trees—she could never learn how one vanishes in the dark of a house. She glanced intently along the books in the book-trough. “Lois has not changed the books!” she exclaimed. “You know how I like them to be appropriate. Here’s a technical book on rubber a man left behind last summer—it looks ridiculous. She’s a girl who never