The maid would have ushered me straight up to the library, but I preferred to send in my card. As I was being conducted up-stairs a minute later I had the privilege of hearing a few words which I am sure Annette intended for my ear.
“Well, I don’t mind this once, Regina; but I can’t have it going on.... Yes, I know it’s an accident; but it’s an accident that mustn’t continue to happen. The very fact that he’s my cousin obliges me to be the more careful. It wouldn’t be fair to your father and mother if I were to let you come here—”
“But, Annette, this once is all I’m asking for.”
“And all I mean to grant.”
I could tell by Annette’s voice that she was retreating to another room, so that by the time I entered Regina stood there alone. Before I knew what I was doing I held both her hands in mine and was kissing them.
It is an odd fact that on raising my eyes I saw her features for the first time since that summer afternoon at Rosyth. On board ship she had always worn the yashmak; and on the dock she had been too far away to allow of my seeing more than that she was there.
The face I saw now was not like Annette’s, untouched by the passage of time and suffering and world agony. You might have said that in its shadows and lines and intensities the whole history of the epoch was expressed. It was one of those twentieth-century faces—they are women’s faces, as a rule—on which the heroic in our time has stamped itself in lineaments which neither paint nor marble could reproduce. It flashed on me that the transmigrated soul had traveled farther than I had suspected.
I don’t know what we said to each other at first. They were no more than broken things, not to be set down by the pen. When I came to the consciousness of my actual words I was saying, “I’m going to make you, Regina; I’m going to make you.”
She responded like a child who recognizes power, but has no questionings as to right and wrong.