“I’ll get out here, please!” said a woman in black, stopping the automobile which had brought her from the railway station within sight of the Fay place. She was tall and slender, and apparently young, but her mourning veil was so thick that it lay like drifting coal-smoke between her face and the curious stare of the chauffeur.
“It’s a quarter of a mile to the gate yet. And I shan’t charge any more to take you right to it,” he explained.
“I know—thank you!” his passenger said. “But I want to walk the rest of the way.”
She had a pretty way of speaking, though rather a foreign sort of accent, he thought. Perhaps it was English. Her luggage had been left at the station, so she was free to do as she pleased, if it amused her to spoil her shoes with the white dust of the road. She paid the price agreed upon, and a dollar over, which the chauffeur acknowledged with a “Thank you, miss!” As he turned and drove away, however, he wondered if he ought to have called her “miss.” To be sure, she had the air of a girl; but her manner was grave. He didn’t know one sort of mourning from another; but being a foreigner like as not she was one of them war widows over there.
The tall young woman walked fast at first, as if she were in a hurry. Through the dark fog of her veil she looked at everything, gazing at each tree as if she recognized it, and at each flowering creeper that flooded the wall of the “Fay place” with color. She passed the main gateway, and went on without hesitation; but as she came near the small gate of the Mirador garden, her pace slackened. She moved very slowly; then fast again; and just outside the gate she stopped, the bosom of her black dress rising and falling as if she were out of breath. It was as though she were afraid to go in at the gate. But after a minute of breathing hard she recovered herself, and opened it, almost noiselessly.
The path on the other side was arched over with pepper trees. The woman in black closed the gate and latched it very gently, almost tenderly. A few berries, like beads of pink coral from a child’s necklace, lay on the old gold of the path. She tiptoed along to avoid treading on them. Presently the path was interrupted by a short flight of old brick steps, and at the top it went on again. In a moment the little pink house was in sight, backed by a great jade-green olive tree, touched with silver in the slanting light of afternoon. The garden was a lovely riot of flowers. It looked sweet and welcoming, with an old-fashioned welcome, but no one was there.
The woman’s heart beat, then missed a beat. She threw back her veil, and her face shone out white and beautiful as the moon shines suddenly through a torn black cloud. It was the face of a girl, but the eyes were the eyes of a woman. They wandered over the garden, then focussed on the house. The open windows were curtainless. There were no chairs under the balcony which gave a shady roof to the front door. Instead, a few odds and ends of broken crockery and disorderly wisps of straw lay scattered here and there. Despite the welcoming charm of the garden, there was an air of desolation about the place, which struck at the woman’s heart. Hesitating no longer, she walked quickly up the path, and paused only at the open door of the little pink house.
Even there she stopped only for a few seconds. The room inside was stripped of furniture. There was no need to knock. The woman walked in and looked through the door of the “parlor” into the kitchen where a child had once cooked dinners for her dolls. It also was empty.
“Gone!” The word dropped from her lips. She did not know that she had spoken until a whispering echo of emptiness answered. Suddenly she realized that she was very tired, more tired than she had ever been in her life before. She seemed to have come to the end of the world, and to have found nothing there but a stone wall.