“The place?”
“When do you go to him again?”
“When I leave here. Perhaps. I hadn't thought.”
They leaned closer together across the desk.
Miss Eunice came in that moment and startled them. She disapproved of their startled expression, he gave Alcott a gloomy greeting and went away.
“There's a chest of tools in the storeroom,” Camilla said. “We'll go up there.”
They mounted to that high-perched room above the mansards, whose windows looked eastward to the river, whose walls were ranged about with boxes, trunks, chests, bits of aged furniture.
Here Richard the Second and Camilla, the little maid, used to sit the long rainy afternoons at their labor. He made bridges, houses, and ships, his artistry running no further than scroll and square patterns, while Camilla aspired to the human face divine. Her soul was creative at ten years. She cut ominous faces on pine shingles, sorrowful shapes—tombstone cherubs in execution, symbolic in intention—and her solemn exaltation of mood was commonly followed by anger and tears because Dick would not admire them.
It was a room full of memories for Camilla. Here and in her father's library she still passed her happiest hours. Here was the trunk that held her retired dolls and baby relics. Another was full of her mother's blue-ribboned gowns. Here was the tool chest, close to the window.
She flung it open, making a great noise and business.