Miss Suffern looked at her with pain. “Why, you don’t suppose, dearest, that Leila would do anything—”
Mrs. Lidcote went on: “For, of course, it’s of the first importance, as you say, that Mrs. Lorin Boulger should be favorably impressed, in order that Wilbour may have the best possible chance of getting Borne.”
“I told Leila you’d feel that, dear. You see, it’s actually on your account—so that they may get a post near you—that Leila invited Mrs. Boulger.”
“Yes, I see that.” Mrs. Lidcote, abruptly rising from her seat, turned her eyes to the clock. “But, as you say, it’s getting late. Oughtn’t we to dress for dinner?”
Miss Suffern, at the suggestion, stood up also, an agitated hand among her bugles. “I do wish I could persuade you to stay up here this evening. I’m sure Leila’d be happier if you would. Really, you’re much too tired to come down.”
“What nonsense, Susy!” Mrs. Lidcote spoke with a sudden sharpness, her hand stretched to the bell. “When do we dine? At half-past eight? Then I must really send you packing. At my age it takes time to dress.”
Miss Suffern, thus projected toward the threshold, lingered there to repeat: “Leila’ll never forgive herself if you make an effort you’re not up to.” But Mrs. Lidcote smiled on her without answering, and the icy lightwave propelled her through the door.
V
Mrs. Lidcote, though she had made the gesture of ringing for her maid, had not done so.
When the door closed, she continued to stand motionless in the middle of her soft spacious room. The fire which had been kindled at twilight danced on the brightness of silver and mirrors and sober gilding; and the sofa toward which she had been urged by Miss Suffern heaped up its cushions in inviting proximity to a table laden with new books and papers. She could not recall having ever been more luxuriously housed, or having ever had so strange a sense of being out alone, under the night, in a windbeaten plain. She sat down by the fire and thought.
A knock on the door made her lift her head, and she saw her daughter on the threshold. The intricate ordering of Leila’s fair hair and the flying folds of her dressinggown showed that she had interrupted her dressing to hasten to her mother; but once in the room she paused a moment, smiling uncertainly, as though she had forgotten the object of her haste.
Mrs. Lidcote rose to her feet. “Time to dress, dearest? Don’t scold! I shan’t be late.”
“To dress?” Leila stood before her with a puzzled look. “Why, I thought, dear—I mean, I hoped you’d decided just to stay here quietly and rest.”
Her mother smiled. “But I’ve been resting all the afternoon!”
“Yes, but—you know you do look tired. And when Susy told me just now that you meant to make the effort—”
“You came to stop me?”
“I came to tell you that you needn’t feel in the least obliged—”
“Of course. I understand that.”
There was a pause during which Leila, vaguely averting herself from her mother’s scrutiny, drifted toward the dressing-table and began to disturb the symmetry of the brushes and bottles laid out on it.
“Do your visitors know that I’m here?” Mrs. Lidcote suddenly went on.
“Do they—Of course—why, naturally,” Leila rejoined, absorbed in trying to turn the stopper of a salts-bottle.
“Then won’t they think it odd if I don’t appear?”
“Oh, not in the least, dearest. I assure you they’ll all understand.” Leila laid down the bottle and turned back to her mother, her face alight with reassurance.
Mrs. Lidcote stood motionless, her head erect, her smiling eyes on her daughter’s. “Will they think it odd if I do?”
Leila stopped short, her lips half parted to reply. As she paused, the colour stole over her bare neck, swept up to her throat, and burst into flame in her cheeks. Thence it sent its devastating crimson up to her very temples, to the lobes of her ears, to the edges of her eyelids, beating all over her in fiery waves, as if fanned by some imperceptible wind.
Mrs. Lidcote silently watched the conflagration; then she turned away her eyes with a slight laugh. “I only meant that I was afraid it might upset the arrangement of your dinner-table if I didn’t come down. If you can assure me that it won’t, I believe I’ll take you at your word and go back to this irresistible sofa.” She paused, as if waiting for her daughter to speak; then she held out her arms. “Run off and dress, dearest; and don’t have me on your mind.” She clasped Leila close, pressing a long kiss on the last afterglow of her subsiding blush. “I do feel the least bit overdone, and if it won’t inconvenience you to have me drop out of things, I believe I’ll basely take to my bed and stay there till your party scatters. And now run off, or you’ll be late; and make my excuses to them all.”
VI
The Barkleys’ visitors had dispersed, and Mrs. Lidcote, completely restored by her two days’ rest, found herself, on the following Monday alone with her children and Miss Suffern.
There was a note of jubilation in the air, for the party had “gone off” so extraordinarily well, and so completely, as it appeared, to the satisfaction of Mrs. Lorin Boulger, that Wilbour’s early appointment to Rome was almost to be counted on. So certain did this seem that the prospect of a prompt reunion mitigated the distress with which Leila learned of her mother’s decision to return almost immediately to Italy. No one understood this decision; it seemed to Leila absolutely unintelligible that Mrs. Lidcote should not stay on with them till their own fate was fixed, and Wilbour echoed her astonishment.
“Why shouldn’t you, as Leila says, wait here till we can all pack up and go together?”
Mrs. Lidcote smiled her gratitude with her refusal. “After all, it’s not yet sure that you’ll be packing up.”
“Oh, you ought to have seen Wilbour with Mrs. Boulger,” Leila triumphed.
“No, you ought to have seen Leila with her,” Leila’s husband exulted.
Miss Suffern enthusiastically appended: “I do think inviting Harriet Fresbie was a stroke of genius!”
“Oh, we’ll be with you soon,” Leila laughed. “So soon that it’s really foolish to separate.”
But Mrs. Lidcote held out with the quiet firmness which her daughter knew it was useless to oppose. After her long months in India, it was really imperative, she declared, that she should get back to Florence and see what was happening to her little place there; and she had been so comfortable on the Utopia that she had a fancy to return by the same ship. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to acquiesce in her decision and keep her with them till the afternoon before the day of the Utopia’s sailing. This arrangement fitted in with certain projects which, during her two days’ seclusion, Mrs. Lidcote had silently matured. It had become to her of the first importance to get away as soon as she could, and the little place in Florence, which held her past in every fold of its curtains and between every page of its books, seemed now to her the one spot where that past would be endurable to look upon.
She was not unhappy during the intervening days. The sight of Leila’s well-being, the sense of Leila’s tenderness, were, after all, what she had come for; and of these she had had full measure. Leila had never been happier or more tender; and the contemplation of her bliss, and the enjoyment of her affection, were an absorbing occupation for her mother. But they were also a sharp strain on certain overtightened chords, and Mrs. Lidcote, when at last she found herself alone in the New York hotel to which she had returned the night before embarking, had the feeling that she had just escaped with her life from the clutch of a giant hand.
She had refused