“Has any one been accusing you?” she says,
a little curiously, “But no! who could?
You have seen no one, not even—”
“No, no!” interrupt I, shrinking from
the sound of the name that I know is coming; “of
course not; no one!”
The clock strikes eleven, and wakes Vick. Barbara
rises, rolls up her knitting, and, going over to the
fireplace, stands with one white elbow resting on
the chimney-piece, and slender neck drooped, pensively
gazing at the low fire.
“Do you know,” she says, with a half-confused
smile, that is also tinged with a little anxiety,
“I have been thinking—it is the first
time for three months that he has not been here at
all, either in the morning, the afternoon, or the
evening!”
“Is it?” say I, slightly shivering.
“I think,” she says, with a rather embarrassed
laugh, “that he must have heard you were
out, and that that was why he did not come. You
know I always tell you that he likes you best.”
She says it, as a joke, and yet her great eyes are
looking at me with a sort of wistfulness, but neither
to them nor to her words can I make any answer.
Next morning I am sitting before my looking-glass—never
to me a pleasant article of furniture—having
my hair dressed. I am hardly awake yet, and have
not quite finished disentangling the real live disagreeables
which I have to face, from the imaginary ones from
which my waking has freed me. At least, in real
life, I am not perpetually pursued, through dull abysses,
by a man in a crape mask, from whom I am madly struggling
to escape, and who is perpetually on the point of
overtaking and seizing me.
It was a mistake going to sleep at all last night.
It would have been far wiser and better to have kept
awake. The real evils are bad enough,
but the dream ones in their vivid life make me shiver
even now, though the morning sun is lying in companionable
patches on the floor, and the birds are loudly talking
all together. Do no birds ever listen?
Distracted for a moment from my own miseries, by the
noise of their soft yet sharp hubbub, I am thinking
this, when a knock comes at the door, and the next
moment Barbara enters. Her blond hair is tumbled
about her shoulders; no white rose’s cheeks
are paler than hers; in her hand she has a note.
In a moment I have dismissed the maid, and we are alone.
“I want you to read this!” she says, in
an even and monotonous voice, from which, by an effort
whose greatness I can dimly guess, she keeps all sound
of trembling.
I have risen and turned from the glass; but now my
knees shake under me so much that I have to sit down
again. She comes behind me, so that I may no
longer see her: and putting her arms round my
neck, and hiding her face in my unfinished hair, says,
whisperingly:
“Do not fret about it, Nancy!—I do
not mind much.”
