Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

61 страница из 81

Ashton, the useful, had patched up the biographies in the little book, helter-skelter, but Brooke did not know it, and tucking the catalogue carefully into her great muff, she leaned back and closed her eyes.

It was her portrait that Lorenz had painted, together with his own, whatever the mystic word “Eucharistia” might mean. He had not forgotten her, then, and he was loath to part with the picture. She did not formulate the pleasure the thought gave her,—it was enough in itself.

Then the brougham stopped before the blazing lights of the St. Hilaire, where the Lawtons were making a temporary home, a sort of bridge, that both mother and daughter had long wearied of, between the simpler past and the long-delayed, complex future, when in the new house, now building, her father promised once and for all to drop the reins of tape and wire, cease from hurrying, and take rest.

ssss1

With Mrs. Lawton the afternoon of the Park musical had been a time of irresolution. When the man of a family is noted for swift arbitrary decisions and often unexplained action in all domestic affairs, in important matters and petty details alike, his wife is apt, simply by force of reaction, to be driven to the opposite extreme in those things that concern herself alone. Not that Adam Lawton’s wife had ever been lacking in spirit, and when, as Pamela Brooke, a girl of twenty, he had taken her from her southern plantation home, then crippled and impoverished by war, yet where she still held absolute sway, many nodded their heads, and said that the calculating, keen-eyed Yankee would some day be startled by the fire of southern blood.