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As she returned, a lady was coming up the walk. She was young and tall, and had a distant effect of great elegance. She held herself very erect, and moved with the rapid, swimming step peculiar to women who are accustomed to the eyes of critical assemblages. Her thin black dress was too elaborate for a country drive; it was a concession to the heat which yet permitted the wearing of a hat, a filmy creation supporting a pair of wings that started up from her beautiful head like white flames. But Mrs. Thorne chiefly observed the look of tense preparation in the face that met hers. She retreated a little from what she felt to be a crisis of some sort, and her heart beat hard with acute agitation.

“Mrs. Thorne?” said the visitor. “Do I need to tell you who I am? Has any one forewarned you of such a person as Helen Benedet?”

The two women clasped hands hurriedly. The worn eyes of the elder, strained by night-watchings, drooped under the young, dark ones, reinforced by their splendor of brows and lashes.

“It was very sweet of you to come,” she said in a lifeless voice.

“Without an invitation! You did not expect me to be quite so sweet as that?”

Mrs. Thorne did not reply to this challenge. “You are not alone?” she asked gently.

“I am alone, dear Mrs. Thorne. I am everything I ought not to be. But you will not mind for an hour or two? It’s a great deal to ask of you, this hot night, I know.”

“You must not think of going back to-night.” Mrs. Thorne glanced at the hired carriage from town. “Did you come on purpose, this dreadful weather, my dear? I am very stupid, but I’ve only just come myself.”

“Oh, you are angelic! I heard at Colfax, as we were coming up, that you were at the mine. I came–by main strength. But I should have come somehow. Have you people staying with you? You look so very gay with your lights–you look like a whole community.”

“We have no lights here, you see; we are anything but gay. We were talking of you only just now,” Mrs. Thorne added infelicitously.

The other did not seem to hear her. She let her eyes rove down the lengths of empty piazza. The close-reefed awnings revealed the stars above the trees, dark and breezeless on the lawn. The matted rose-vines clung to the pillars motionless.

“What a strange, dear place!” she murmured. “And there is no one here?”

“No one at all. We are quite alone. We really must have you.”

“I will stay, then. It’s perfectly fearful, all I have to say to you. I shall tire you to death.”

Ito, appearing, was ordered to send away the lady’s carriage.

“May he bring me a glass of water? Just water, please.” The tall girl, in her long black dress, moved to and fro, making a pretense of the view to escape observation.

“What is that sloping house that roars so? It sounds like a house of beasts. Oh, the stamps, of course! There goes one on the bare metal. Did anything break then?”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Thorne; “things do not break so easily as that in a stamp-mill. Only the rock gets broken.”

Ito returned with a tray of iced soda, and was spoken to aside by his mistress.

“It’s quite a farce,” she said, “preparing beds for our friends in this weather. No one sleeps until after two, and then it is morning; and though we shut out the heat, it beats on the walls and burns up the air inside, and we wake more tired than ever.”

“Let us not think of sleep! I need all the night to talk in. I have to tell you impossible things.”

“Is Willy’s father to be included in this talk?” Mrs. Thorne inquired; “because he is coming–he is there, at the gate.”

She rose uneasily. Her visitor rose, too, and together they watched the man’s unconscious figure approaching. An electric lamp above the gate threw long shadows, like spokes of a wheel, across the grass. Mr. Thorne’s face was invisible till he had reached the steps.