Green Doors lay a few miles beyond Meadowbrook, well away from the main highway on a meandering country road of its own. The new house had been built on the site of the old farmhouse which it had replaced, with its front door only a few paces from the road. In a general way the new house followed the contours of the old. The long, low lines of the sheds and the high, gabled lines of the barn—all house now—gave the place, as one came on it, a casual air of simplicity. It melted into the landscape as if it were painted on it. The white walls, shadowed by old, gnarled apple trees, were friendly with the dusty white country road, while the entire landscape of meadows and fields, with stretches of brook-cooled woodland, cradled the new dwelling as no changeling but its own child, in a peaceful lap. So Lewis at any rate felt as he arrived with Dick, in Dick’s car, at tea time on that Saturday afternoon which had come, at last.

“That’s Clare’s guest house,” Dick explained of a small one-story doll-house-like place directly across the way from the big house. “It used to be the cow sheds. We found it amusing, having the estate cut in two by the public road, and we have used the road in our landscaping—up to the hilt. Autos almost never come this way, and the hay carts and occasional cows that do only add to the flavor. Isn’t it jolly!”

“Very!” Lewis agreed. “And infinitely peaceful. Does Farwell write here at Green Doors?” He was contrasting the novelist’s Cambridge home with this latest one and thinking that Clare appeared, at least on the surface, to have been successful in giving this particular artist an ideal environment for his creative ventures.

“Oh, yes. But in a little studio off in the woods. He made us build it according to his own ideas and Farwell’s genius doesn’t work along the lines of architecture. But such as it is, it’s his own, and that’s charm enough, I suppose. We’ve laughed over it quite a lot, Clare and I, but it’s well out of sight and it doesn’t matter what it looks like so very much, just so long as it serves its purpose. And it does that. The man practically lives there.”

Lewis could not help thinking of his own books written in snatched minutes at his office, on trains, in hotel bedrooms in the dead of night with the call to sleep like a fire-engine siren shrieking a warning in his brain. But Farwell’s was creative writing and that was a different sort altogether, necessitating leisure and solitude, at any price—possibly! But there Lewis pulled himself up. “Lord! This matter of price is none of my business! They may be quite decent people at heart, really, and even happy!”

The front door had its step—a big, flat slate stone—a little below the level of the road. The hall into which one entered after so unpretentious an approach was almost startling in its palatial proportions. It was the height of the old barn, and the floor and the walls—with a balcony running around the second story on three sides—were made of composition which gave the effect of stone. In its own right, this great hall was a work of art; but on such a day as this, with the whole farther end opened to the New England countryside, it became merely a neutral frame for the garden, which, a mass of passionate color, cut a flaming swathe through a wooded valley to orchard-draped hills beyond.

The maid who had opened the door for them said, “Mrs. Farwell would like you to go through into the garden. She is under the elm.”

The terrace, as they came to it, was merely an unroofed continuation of the floor of the great hall. It ended with wide slabs of flower-rimmed stone shelving down into grassy sweeps of hot June color. Off at one side, in a distant corner of the lawn, some Chinese garden chairs were grouped around a rustic table in the shade of a perfect wineglass elm. A little beyond, in the same shade, a woman in a white dress lay stretched in a long chair, her back to the house. A big garden hat, brilliant orange, was tossed on the grass beside her.

But Mrs. Farwell was not asleep, for she heard their voices, and jumping up, came several steps out beyond the shade in her eagerness to welcome them.

“Petra and I were to play tennis. She was to have joined me here—oh—ages ago—and she hasn’t, and I’ve just stayed on waiting all afternoon, and never dreamed it was tea time. Look at me!”—Mrs. Farwell meant apology for her crumpled, sleeveless frock, for her ankle socks on suntanned bare legs, for rather shabby sneakers. “I meant to change, of course. But the afternoon is a dream and I have been dreaming with it, since Petra never came. The child must not forget her tea date, though, and I don’t think she will. She remembered you perfectly, Doctor Pryne, and seemed actually pleased that you were coming.—Yes, Richard! Petra showed pleasure. Doesn’t that sound propitious?”

She stood for another minute out in the glare where she had met her guests, looking hopefully toward the house, as if half expecting Petra’s arrival to coincide with theirs. “Lowell too!” she murmured. “My husband was terribly pleased you were coming, Doctor Pryne. But time doesn’t exist for him when he is working. He will be sure to turn up, though. He has no intention of missing you—this time.”

Then she shaded her brow with her palm and, turning suddenly to Dick, smiled deliberately and sweetly into his eyes. Lewis wished he had been looking somewhere else when this happened. She led them back to the chairs and herself took the one nearest the tea table.

His hostess was not nearly so pretty as Lewis remembered her. But she was much more than pretty! Yes—sitting upright against the fantastic high back of the Chinese chair, in her sleeveless white frock, her hair black as the lacquer of the wickerwork, her very long, curving lashes black, tipped in gold, and dimples subtly hinted in her thin cheeks—she was vital and engaging.

But specious!—Lewis quickly added. Before, when he had thought her rather beautiful and certainly naÏvely ingenuous, he had been looking at her through the beginning of twilight in a city apartment. But this second time her background was an elm and the light was of broad day. That changed things somewhat. Lewis did not particularly enjoy his present skepticism. But he could not help himself. And his next unhallowed thought was “Poor Dick!” For the latest Mrs. Farwell’s particular variety of predatoriness was of the sort that relishes a spiritual flavor to its meat; so Lewis, at any rate, hazarded. The bodies, even the hearts of men, would not be enough: Clare Farwell would demand the soul before all.

“Pretty selfish of Petra to waste your afternoon for you like this!” Dick exclaimed. He turned to Lewis. “You can see for yourself how it is. You’ve run right onto it, first thing, without our showing you. It’s always like this. This is the way Petra treats Clare.”

“Oh, Richard! Please! How horrid that sounds. It’s a little unjust as well. This time I am almost certain she really and genuinely forgot I was waiting for her. Her offering to play with me at all was generous. Petra is a hum-dinger at tennis, Doctor Pryne, and I am only fairish. So it’s not much fun for her, playing with me. This is probably the truth of it: Petra wanted to be nice, then her subconscious mind got busy making her forget and so saved her from having to be nice. Doctor Pryne will tell you, Richard, that the hardest things not to forget are the duties which bore us.” She was laughing but in spite of that she meant them to believe her serious.

Clare would call Dick “Richard.” Given her type, it was almost inevitable. Lewis wondered why it had taken him so unaware and why it need so irritate him. And it was also inevitable—but for this he had been totally unprepared—that she would overtly exonerate the slandered Petra and in the very act make it look worse for the child. For she was a person who could have her cake and eat it too, every time. It was a trick act, peculiar to the type.... But Lewis liked his own critical self less and less in exact ratio as he found himself liking Petra’s stepmother less and less. He wished he had never had to see her by daylight.

“Subconscious mind nothing!” Dick scoffed. “Clare, you’re always making excuses for everybody, but most of all for Petra. Couldn’t she see you waiting out here all afternoon from every window in the house? Wouldn’t that circumvent her subconscious forgettery mechanisms?”

“Oh yes, if she were in the house, my dear Richard. But she may have gone for a walk. Now, though, she’ll be back, dressing for this party of ours. I should have!”