Another Woman's House Read Online Free PDF

the valley without, Myra thought, seeing them. His mouth was straight and uncommunicative. She felt suddenly very tired; her lips were dry. She must leave. She must leave the house the next day, and the library and the talk with Richard immediately, for she could not bear it a moment longer.
    She rose, and Barton entered with the papers and the mail on a tray. Richard whirled around abruptly to toss his cigarette in the fire and said, “Come for a walk with me, Myra. There’s an hour or so before dinner. Barton, will you get Miss Lane’s coat?”
    She didn’t want to go. She had to escape, but she did not. She stood still, a slender, straight figure in her light-gray country suit and sweater. Her face was rather white, and her eyes, in the mirror over the fireplace, were dark blue and troubled, but she did not see her own reflection. Barton came back with her loose scarlet coat which Richard took and placed round her shoulders. He opened one of the French windows—perhaps the window which Jack Manders had opened on a night nearly two years ago, strolling from the cottage he shared with Webb Manders—the small, comfortable cottage, suitable to two middle-aged bachelors, living alone—around the point to the Thorne House. Through the warm, quiet night, to chat and borrow a book, Alice had always said.
    They went out on the terrace.
    It had turned colder and the spring twilight was clear and chill. The dogwoods and lilacs were in bud but their bare branches still made a fine brown tracing against the pale sky. There was a golden haze around the forsythia. The air was cool and moist with a light smell of the sea and a bright star hung low on the horizon. The whistles of the peepers in the woods between the house and the road made a delicate, fluting fabric of sound through the tranquil dusk.
    Richard closed the door behind them and they crossed the damp flagstones of the terrace toward the wide steps and thus did not hear the telephone which rang several times, loudly, at the extension in the hall. Barton, in the pantry, finally answered it.

CHAPTER 3
    A S THE PATH CURVED toward the pines, there was a view of the house, clear against the evening sky.
    It stood on a point above the Sound.
    It had no name, really, but it had always been called Thorne House. It had changed very little from the time old Phineas Thorne, having built the Thorne fortune, looked around for a site and built the Thorne House upon it. It was solidly and well built because Phineas would have been content with no other way of building; that it was also beautiful was due to the chance of securing a fine architect who, besides a knowledge of balance and proportion, had the wisdom to yield to Phineas’ own innate sense of simplicity and grace.
    The result was a happy one. The house was of no particular period; it escaped the cramped rooms and narrow halls of the typical New England house by borrowing the generous height of ceiling and spaciousness of the great Southern houses of the time. The Thornes were of English and Scottish descent; From England, perhaps, came the plan for the wide central hall, the numerous chimneys, the thickness of walls and the solid, but gracious lines of the house.
    Also from England, perhaps, came much of the feeling for substantial materials, wood and stone that would last for generations. Phineas Thorne had felt that he was building a family as he had built a fortune. The house itself was brick, especially ordered, especially kilned; a mellow, pinkish brick, weathering through the years to the softness of a well-rippened peach; wistaria with trunks as thick as a man’s wrist, and deep, dark-green ivy, brought from England, clung to the old bricks, the luxuriant growth clipped back from windows and doorways. The window frames themselves were cypress and, inside the house, the floors were teakwood, the stairways cypress, too, the balustrades mahogany, worn satin-smooth by the pressure of many