"What woman, Sarah?" said Caspar, carelessly. He was writing and smoking, and did not look up from his work.
"The woman, Kingston, that ran away," said Sarah, indignantly. "I nearly shut the door in her face, sir, I did."
"That wouldn't have been legal," said Mr. Brooke. "Why doesn't she see Miss Brooke or Miss Lesley? I am busy."
"I expect she thinks she can get round you more easy," said Sarah, who was a very old servant, and occasionally took liberties with her master and mistress.
"She won't do that, Sarah," said Caspar, laughing a little in spite of himself. "Show her in."
He laid down his pen and his pipe with a rather weary air. Really, he was becoming involved in no end of domestic worries, and with few compensations for his trouble! Such was his silent thought. Lesley would, shortly leave him: Alice had refused to come back to his house. Well, it would be but for a short time. He had almost made up his mind that when Lesley was gone he would give up a house altogether, establish his sister in a flat, throw journalism to the winds, and go abroad. The life that he had led so long, the life of London offices and streets, of the study and the committee-room, had become distasteful to him. As he thrust away from him the manuscript at which he had been busy, his lips were, half unconsciously, murmuring a very well-worn quotation—
"For I will see before I die,
The palms and temples of the South."
And from this passing day-dream he was roused by the entrance of a woman whom he knew only as his daughter's maid.
He was struck at once by some indefinable change that had passed over her since he had seen her last. He had noticed her, as he noticed everybody that came within his ken; and he had remarked the mechanical precision of her demeanor, the dull sadness of her lifeless eyes. There was a light in her face now, a tremulous quiver of her lips, a slight color in her thin cheeks. She looked like a creature who could feel and think: not an automaton, worked by ingenious machinery.
He noted the change, but did not estimate it at its true worth. He thought she was simply excited by the consciousness of her misdemeanor, and by the prospect of an interview with him. He put on his most magisterial manner as he spoke to her.