She had finished all the essentials of her packing and her box stood with its lid open ready for the last disposals. Yet the room seemed still full of her personality. He noted it all gazing around him with eyes almost those of a solemn little boy permitted to glance in at a Christmas-tree.
Her dressing-table, improvised from the mantelpiece, was neatly laid out with small, worn, costly, and immaculate appurtenances. He moved forward and looked at them, not touching. The initials intertwined on the backs of the ivory brushes were her girlish ones: A. T. She had discarded, long since, no doubt, her wedding toilet set.
If he became her husband, the thought crossed his mind and quickened his heart, he might brush her hair for her, that wonderful golden hair, before many months were over.
Near the ivory hand-glass stood two photographs in a folding frame of faded blue leather. He stooped to look and saw that one was of Mrs. and the other certainly of Mr. Toner, in their early days. Remote, mysterious and alien, their formally directed eyes looked back at him and in the father’s ingenuous young countenance, surmounted by a roll of hair that was provincial without being exactly rural, the chin resting upon a large, peculiar collar, he could strangely retrace Adrienne’s wide brow and steadfast light-filled eyes. Mrs. Toner wore a ruffled dress and of her face little remained distinct but the dark gaze—forceful and ambiguously gentle.
The room was full of the fragrance that was not a fragrance and that had, long ago, reminded him of Fuller’s earth. A pair of small blue satin mules stood under a chair near the bed.
Only after he had withdrawn, gently closing the door behind him, did he realize that he had forgotten the kettle and then he felt that he could not go back again. A moment after the boy returned with a note, sent, by hand, he was informed, from the Croix Rousse.
“I am so dreadfully sorry, so disappointed,” he read. “Our last afternoon, but I can’t get away yet. Don’t wait dinner for me, if I should be late, even for that. I won’t be very late, I promise, and we will have our evening.”
The note had no address. He rushed forth and down to find the messenger gone. Had he only known where to seek her in the vast, high, melancholy district of the Croix Rousse he would have gone to join her. His sense of loneliness was almost a panic.
Of course, he tried to fix his mind on that realization, as he went back to the salon, her rapatriés had no doubt preoccupied her mind, from the first, quite as much as their own situation. She had spoken to him in especial of this family and of their sorrows. One child they had left dead at Evian and the mother, on the eve of their return to their Northern home, had become too desperately ill to travel. “Such dear, good, gentle people,” he recalled her saying. No; he must not repine. After all he had only the one thing to say to her; and the evening would be long enough for that.
It was nearly seven when he heard her quick footstep outside. When she entered, the brim of her little hat, in the electric light, cast a sharp shadow over her eyes, but he saw at once that she had been crying.