"I'm old," she said, "and I'm growing silly."
She put her pen neatly in the inkstand tray: it was an old silver pen, and an old inkstand of Sèvres porcelain. Then she went out into the garden by the French window, muffled in jasmine, and found herself face to face with a stranger, a straight well-set-up man of forty or thereabouts, with iron-grey hair and a white moustache. Before his hand had time to reach the Panama hat she knew him, and her heart leaped up and sank sick and trembling. But she said: —
"To whom have I the pleasure – ?"
The man caught her hands.
"Why, Dolly," he said, "don't you know me? I should have known you anywhere."
A rose-flush deepened on her face.
"It can't be Robert?"
"Can't it? And how are you, Dolly? Everything's just the same – By Jove! the very same heliotropes and pansies in the very same border – and the jasmine and the sundial and everything."
"They tell me the trees have grown," she said. "I like to think it's all the same. Why didn't you tell me you were coming home? Come in."
She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds.
"I don't know. I wanted to surprise you – and, by George! I've surprised myself. It's beautiful. It's all just as it used to be, Dolly."
The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be.
"I'll tell them you're staying for lunch."
She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to catch strongly at her lost composure.
If anyone had had the right to ask the reason of her agitation, and had asked it, Dorothea would have said that the sudden happening of anything was enough to upset one in whose life nothing ever happened. But no one had the right.
She went into the kitchen to give the necessary orders.
"Not the mince," she said; "or, stay. Yes, that would do, too. You must cook the fowl that was for to-night's dinner – and Jane can go down to the village for something else for to-night. And salad and raspberries. And I will put out some wine. My cousin, Mr. Courtenay, has come home from India. He will lunch with me."
"Master Bob," said the cook, as the kitchen door closed, "well, if I ever did! He's a married man by this time, with young folkses growing up around him, I shouldn't wonder. He never did look twice the same side of the road where she was. Poor Miss Dolly!"
Most of us are mercifully ignorant of the sympathy that surrounds us.
"It's wonderful," he said, when she rejoined him in the drawing-room. "I feel like the Prodigal Son. When I think of the drawing-rooms I've seen. The gim-crack trumpery, the curtains and the pictures and the furniture constantly shifted, the silly chatter, the obvious curios, the commonplace rarities, the inartistic art, and the brainless empty chatter, spiteful as often as not, and all the time this has been going on beautifully, quietly, perfectly. Dolly, you're a lucky girl!"
To her face the word brought a flush that almost justified it.
They talked: and he told her how all these long years he had wearied for the sight of English fields, and gardens, of an English home like this – till he almost believed that he was speaking the truth.
He looked at Dorothea with long, restful hands quietly folded, as she talked in the darkened drawing-room, at Dorothea with busy, skilful hands among the old silver and the old glass and the old painted china at lunch. He listened through the drowsy afternoon to Dorothea's gentle, high-bred, low-toned voice, to the music of her soft, rare laugh, as they sat in the wicker-chairs under the weeping ash on the lawn.
And he thought of other women – a crowd of them, with high, shrill tones and constant foolish cackle of meaningless laughter; of the atmosphere of paint, powder, furbelows, flirtation, empty gaiety, feverish flippancy. He thought, too, of women, two and three, whose faces stood out from the crowd and yet were of it. And he looked at Dorothea's delicate worn face and her honest eyes with the faint lines round them.
As he went through the hush of the evening to his rooms at the "Spotted Dog" the thought of Dorothea, of her house, her garden, her peaceful ordered life stirred him to a passion of appreciation. Out of the waste and desert of his own life, with its memories of the far country and the husks and the swine, he seemed to be looking through a window at the peaceful life – as a hungry, lonely tramp may limp to a lamp-lit window, and peering in, see father and mother and round-faced children, and the table spread whitely, and the good sure food that to these people is a calm certainty, like breathing or sleeping, not a joyous accident, or one of the great things that man was taught to pray for. The tramp turns away with a curse or a groan, according to his nature, and goes on his way cursing or groaning, or, if the pinch be fierce, he tries the back door or the unguarded window. With Robert the pang of longing was keen, and he was minded to try any door – not to beg for the broken meats of cousinly kindness, but to enter as master into that "better place" wherein Dorothea had found so little of Paradise.
It was no matter of worldly gain. The Prodigal had not wasted his material substance on the cheap husks that cost so dear. He had money enough and to spare: it was in peace and the dignity of life that he now found himself to be bankrupt.
As for Dorothea, when she brushed her long pale hair that night she found that her hands were not so steady as usual, and in the morning she was quite shocked to note that she had laid her hair-pins on the left-hand side of the pin-cushion instead of on the right, a thing she had not done for years.
It was at the end of a week, a week of long sunny days and dewy dark evenings spent in the atmosphere that had enslaved him. Dinner was over. Robert had smoked his cigar among the garden's lengthening shadows. Now he and Dorothea were at the window watching the light of life die beautifully on the changing face of the sky.
They had talked as this week had taught them to talk – with the intimacy of old friends and the mutual interest of new unexplored acquaintances. This is the talk that does not weary – the talk that can only be kept alive by the daring of revelation, and the stronger courage of unconquerable reserve.
Now there came a silence – with it seemed to come the moment. Robert spoke —
"Dorothea," he said, and her mind pricked its ears suspiciously because he had not called her Dolly.
"Well?"
"I wonder if you understand what these days have been to me? I was so tired of the world and its follies – this is like some calm haven after a stormy sea."
The words seemed strangely familiar. He had a grating sense of talking like a book, and something within him sneered at the scruple, and said that Dolly would not notice it.
But she said: "I'm sure I've read something like that in a school reading book, but it's very touching, of course."
"Oh – if you're going to mock my holiest sentiments," he said lightly – and withdrew from the attack.
The moment seemed to flutter near again when she said good night to him in the porch where the violet clematis swung against his