At that moment the door opened and Mrs. Yule entered the room. With her was Dr. Reynolds, carrying a black leather bag.
"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Yule, catching sight of Louise. "I am sorry, Ambrose. I did not know you had a visitor."
"All right, dear," said the vicar; "this is Madame Brandès, who is staying with the Whitakers. She wants to consult me on some personal matter." Then he turned to Dr. Reynolds. "Well, doctor; how do you find our boy?"
"Quite all right. Quite all right," said the doctor. "We shall have him up and playing football again in no time. It is nothing but a strained tendon. Absolutely nothing at all."
Mrs. Yule had gone towards Louise with outstretched hand. "How do you do? I am glad to meet you," she said cordially. "You will stay for tea with us, I hope. My daughter, too, will be so pleased to see you. Not"—she added, with a little break in her voice—"that she really can see you. Perhaps you have heard that my dear daughter is blind."
"Blind!" Like a tidal wave the sorrow of the world seemed to overwhelm Louise. She felt that the sadness of life was too great to be borne. "Blind," she said. Then she covered her face and burst into tears.
Mrs. Yule's maternal heart melted; her maternal eyes noted the broken attitude, the tell-tale line of the figure! she stepped quickly forward, holding out both her hands.
"Come, my dear; sit down. Will you let me take your hat off? This English weather is so trying if one is not used to it," murmured Mrs. Yule with Anglo-Saxon shyness before the stranger's unexpected display of feeling, while the two men turned away and talked together near the window. Mrs. Yule pressed Louise's black-gloved hand in hers. What though this outburst were due, as it probably was, to the woman's condition, to her overwrought nerves, or to who knows what grief and misery of her own? The fact remained—and Mrs. Yule never forgot it—that this storm of tears was evoked by the news of her dear child's affliction. Mrs. Yule's heart was touched.
"You are Belgian, I know," she said in French, sitting down beside Louise and taking one of the black-gloved hands in her own. "I myself was at school in Brussels." And indeed her French was perfect, with just a little touch of Walloon closing the vowels in some of her words. "I would have called on you long ago—I would have asked you to make friends with my daughter whose affliction has so distressed your kind heart; but as you may have heard, my boy met with an accident, and I have not left the house for many days.... Do wait a moment, Dr. Reynolds," she added as the doctor approached to bid her good-bye. And turning to Louise she introduced him to her as "the kindest of friends and the best of doctors."
"We have met," said Dr. Reynolds, shaking hands with Louise and looking keenly into her face with his piercing, short-sighted eyes. "Madame Brandès's little daughter," he added, turning to Mrs. Yule, "is a patient of mine." There was a moment's silence; then the doctor, turning to the vicar, added in a lower voice: "It seems that their home was invaded, and the child terribly frightened. It is a very sad case. She has lost her reason and her power of speech."