They, too, had shifted their positions and were looking at her with one undisguised expression of pride and love; and they smiled as she smiled radiantly back at them, waving a last adieu with her spray of rose and turning quickly in a dread of foolish tears.

“Isabel.”

It was the youthful voice of her grandmother.  She faced them again with a little frown of feigned impatience.

“If you are going into the garden, throw something around your shoulders.”

“Thank you, grandmother; I have my lace.”

Crossing the hall, she went into the front parlor, took from a damask sofa a rare shawl of white lace and, walking to a mirror, threw it over her head, absently noting the effect in profile.  She lifted this off and, breaking the rose from part of its stem, pinned that on her breast.  Then, stepping aside to one of the large lofty windows, she stood there under the droop of the curtains, sunk into reverie again and looking out upon the yard and the street beyond.

Hardly a sound disturbed the twilight stillness.  A lamplighter passed, torching the grim lamps.  A sauntering carrier threw the evening newspaper over the gate, with his unintelligible cry.  A dog-cart rumbled by, and later, a brougham; people were not yet returned from driving on the country turnpikes.  Once, some belated girls clattered past on ponies.  But already little children, bare-armed, bare-necked, swinging lanterns, and attended by proud young mothers, were on their way to a summer-night festival in the park.  Up and down the street family groups were forming on the verandas.  The red disks of cigars could be seen, and the laughter of happy women was wafted across the dividing fences and shrubbery, and vines.

Breaking again through her reverie, which seemed to envelop her, wherever she went, like a beautiful cloud, she left the window and appeared at the front door.  Palms stood on each side of the granite steps, and these arched their tropical leaves far over toward her quiet feet as she passed down.  Along the pavement were set huge green boxes, in which white oleanders grew, and flaming pomegranates, and crepe myrtle thickly roofed with pink.  She was used to hover about them at this hour, but she strolled past, unmindful now, the daily habit obliterated, the dumb little tie quite broken.  The twisted newspaper lay white on the shadowed pavement before her eyes and she did not see that.  She walked on until she reached the gate and, folding her hands about one of the brass globes surmounting the iron spikes, leaned over and probed with impatient eyes the long dusk of the street; as far as he could be seen coming she wished to see him.

It was too early.  So she filled her eyes with pictures of the daylight fading over woods and fields far out in the country.  But the entire flock of wistful thoughts settled at last about a large house situated on a wooded hill some miles from town.  A lawn sloped upward to it from the turnpike, and there was a gravelled driveway.  She unlatched the gate, approached the house, passed through the wide hall, ascended the stairs, stood at the door of his room—­waiting.  Why did he not come?  How could he linger?