------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XI THE WHITE DARKNESS FLORENCE watched the riders down the terrace with a curious sense of participation in the race. The whole thing had gone with such reckless abandon! What had happened to set Julia, with her hot glitter, headlong on such an escapade, to drag Longacre so doggedly after her? Her presentiment recurred to Florence with a hopeless drop of courage—that, after all, it had been too late! In freeing him, then, had she simply thrust him from her over a precipice? She saw from the veranda the pink coats crowding through the drive gate. She heard around her voices exclaiming, reassuring, complaining. The riders had left behind them confusion of a petty, biting quality. She felt her endurance at snapping-point. She wanted to get out to “Tres Pinos,” to stand on the rocky point, above the tumult of the sea, and shout against the shouting breakers. Instead she walked among oleanders and pampas plumes with a rigorous composure. The placid face of the garden, with its blended sweets and colors, was cloying; the passionless blue sky, defiant. She had let him go! After that she had hoped at least for quiet—even the quiet of hopelessness. But here was only irritating unrest, a striving to understand what, after all, she had done. She had meant that release to be so much to him! She kept seeing Longacre as he had left her. She kept hearing him reproach her: “Why didn’t you tell me before?” The whole thing was in that! She paced the garden over, threaded its thickets, measured its lawns with her steps, distanced its farthest hedges—moving, moving, while shadows lengthened over the lawns, the light grew yellow, the sun struck aslant through the oaks. Her thoughts kept her eyes oblivious to the waning of the afternoon, to the increasing chill in the breeze, to the queer, damp breath that seemed to come from no quarter, but to exhale from the earth, the sky, the sea. She came back to keen consciousness of her surroundings with a high voice questing her among the trees. “What are you doing, poked off here at the end of creation?” cried Cissy. “We’re going to drive over to the club to see the finish and have supper. It’s the most we can do after the way they rushed off and left us!” There was a pettish twitch to her tiny chin. “Emma is having a fit for fear something has happened to ‘dear Julia,’ though I should say she’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself. There’s not the least bit of danger.” “Danger?” Florence repeated uneasily. “Why, the fog! Look!” Cissy indicated airily. Florence saw a gray sea drifting up the bay, ocean above ocean, covering the far turn of the coast, and flowing, white as wool, among the low hills to the south. “Of course there’s no danger they’ll run into it,” Cissy was saying. “They’ll finish in less than an hour—so hurry.”