But Fanchon could only sob and whisper, "Hush, hush!" in the dim room where they sat, the windows darkened so that, after he had gone, he should not remember how red her eyes were, and the purple depths under them, and thus forget how pretty she had been at her best. After a time, finding that the more he tried to cheer her, the more brokenly she wept, he grew silent, only stroking her head, while the summer sounds came in through the window: the mill-whir of locusts, the small monotone of distant farm- bells, the laughter of children in the street, and the gay arias of a mocking-bird singing in the open window of the next house. So they sat together through the long, still afternoon of the last day.
No one in Rouen found that afternoon particularly enlivening. Even Mrs.
Tanberry gave way to the common depression, and, once more, her doctrine of cheerfulness relegated to the ghostly ranks of the purely theoretical, she bowed under the burden of her woe so far as to sing "Methought I Met a Damsel Fair" (her of the bursting sighs) at the piano. Whenever sadness lay upon her soul she had acquired the habit of resorting to this unhappy ballad; today she sang it four times. Mr. Carewe was not at home, and had announced that though he intended to honor the evening meal by his attendance, he should be away for the evening itself; as comment upon which statement Mrs. Tanberry had offered ambiguously the one word, "Amen!" He was stung to no reply, and she had noted the circumstance as unusual, and also that he had appeared to labor with the suppression of a keen excitement, which made him anxious to escape from her sharp little eyes; an agitation for which she easily accounted when she recalled that he had seen Vanrevel on the previous evening. Mr. Carewe had kept his promise to preserve the peace, as he always kept it when the two met on neutral ground, but she had observed that his face showed a kind of hard- leashed violence whenever he had been forced to breathe the air of the same room with his enemy, and that the thing grew on him.
Miss Betty exhibited not precisely a burning interest in the adventure of the Damsel Fair, wandering out of the room during the second rendition, wandering back again, and once more away. She had moved about the house in this fashion since early morning, wearing what Mamie described as a "peak-ed look." White-faced and restless, with distressed eyes, to which no sleep had come in the night, she could not read; she could no more than touch her harp; she could not sleep; she could not remain quiet for three minutes together. Often she sank into a chair with an air of languor and weariness, only to start immediately out of it and seek some other part of the house, or to go and pace the garden. Here, in the air heavy with roses and tremulous with June, as she walked rapidly up and down, late in the afternoon, at the time when the faraway farm-bells were calling men from the fields to supper, the climax of her restlessness came. That anguish and desperation, so old in her sex, the rebellion against the law that inaction must be her part, had fallen upon her for the first time.
She came to an abrupt stop and struck her hands together despairingly, and spoke aloud.
"What shall I do! What shall I do!"
"Ma'am?" asked a surprised voice, just behind her.
She wheeled quickly about, to behold a shock-headed urchin of ten in the path near the little clearing. He was ragged, tanned, dusty, neither shoes nor coat trammelling his independence; and be had evidently entered the garden through the gap in the hedge.
"I thought you spoke to me?" he said, inquiringly.
"I didn't see you," she returned. "What is it?"
"You Miss Carewe?" he asked; but before she could answer he said, reassuringly, "Why, of course you are! I remember you perfect, now I git the light on you, so to speak. Don't you remember me?"
"No, I don't think I do."
"Lord!" he responded, wonderingly. "I was one of the boys with you on them boxes the night of your pa's fire!" Mingled with the surprise in his tone was a respectful unction which intimated how greatly he honored her father for having been the owner of so satisfactory a conflagration.
"Were you? Perhaps I'll remember you if you give me time."
But at this point the youth recalled the fact that he had an errand to discharge, and, assuming an expression of businesslike haste too pressing to permit farther parley, sought in his pocket and produced a sealed envelope, with which he advanced upon her.
"Here. There's an answer. He told me not to tell nobody who sent it, and not to give it to nobody on earth but you, and how to slip in through the hedge and try and find you in the garden when nobody was lookin', and he give a pencil for you to answer on the back of it, and a dollar."
Miss Betty took the note, glancing once over her shoulder at the house, but Mrs. Tanberry was still occupied with the Maiden, and no one was in sight. She read the message hastily.
"I have obeyed you, and shall always. You have not sent for me. Perhaps that was because there was no time when you thought it safe. Perhaps you have still felt there would be a loss of dignity. Does that weigh with you against good-by? Tell me, if you can, that you have it in your heart to let me go without seeing you once more, without good-by--for the last time. Or was it untrue that you wrote me what you did? Was that dear letter but a little fairy dream of mine? Ah, will you see me again, this once--this once--let me look at you, let me talk with you, hear your voice? The last time!"
There was no signature.
