Pinioned between his alternatives, his eye caught his own name on an envelope that carried a New York postmark. He took it up slowly. He read the letter-head. This was what he had been waiting for for months. This was to have made the turn in his life. Now a quite different thing had made it. The turn was a wrench. Everything, beside it, was insignificant. He ripped open the letter with indifference. He read it with his brain still tortured with his quandary, and got no meaning from it, only an impression that it was not what he had expected. He re-read the cautious sentences, this time with attention. There had been some lack of authority for the final decision in the last communication from the Metropolitan Opera Syndicate. On account of—he got through the list of reasons to the closing sentence—the Syndicate could not, after all, arrange to produce the “Harold.” He stood looking at the hand that held the envelop while the blood gathered in his face. A year of unsparing labor, a year of wire-pulling and waiting, thrown over because of a stronger pull! He had nothing to offer but failure. Nothing to offer Florence. That was the name he thought. But under the thought was the death of a wild, rebel hope. He lifted his eyes to see Florence on the step above him. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX MRS. ESSINGTON SAYS “NO” SHE wore a gown of sheer white, with a mantle of Spanish lace drawn close over her sloping shoulders and the flowing lines of her arms. Above it her large gray eyes looked out luminously. “What is it?” she asked. Her face was full of queries. She divined her crisis already upon her. Without a word he handed her the letter. She read it through, dwelt on it a frowning space—looked at him while the frown smoothed itself. His full under lip twitched with a suggestion half cruel, half sensitive. She saw he was suffering, but there was a confusion of feeling, something with which the letter had nothing to do. “Let us go somewhere else,” she said. Her glance had traveled toward the open door. He followed her through the library, dreading lest she pause there; but she went on into the conservatory. He closed the door, shutting them into the room of glass. In the midst of the transparent walls, searched by the sun, they were alone. The north end where the outer door opened, the south end looking on the lift of the hill lawn, were screened thick with heliotrope and passion-vine. The west fronted the skirts of the terrace, the somber, lonely oak-plantation, the distant sea. They saw through glass the out-of-doors, spacious, fresh, moved by the wind. Within, the air was motionless, too hot, too sweet, with scents of newly watered flowers.