Hildegarde passed a wakeful night of troubled thought. Only after the tardy dawn of the early spring was in the room did she fall into the dull slumber of exhaustion, from which she roused at last, unrefreshed and languid. Before she broke her fast she dispatched a note to Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, declining on second thoughts the invitation to make the trip to New Orleans and St. Simon’s Island, which she had welcomed so enthusiastically when it was broached the previous day. She gave no reason for her change of mind, but expressed her thanks very prettily and courteously; the conventional, suave phrases exacted by decorum incongruous with the pale, stern, set face that bent above them. Her mother cried out in surprise and solicitude when she came into the library, with this mask, so to speak, alien to the joyous countenance she was wont to wear, so soft and glowing, so bland and gay, but she petulantly put aside all inquiries, declaring that she was quite well and only wanted to be left alone. To be quit of the family she escaped into the solitary sun-parlor, and sat there in a wicker chair among the palms, and watched the blooms in the window-boxes that illumined the space with their vivid glintings. For there was no sun to-day—a hazy, soft, gray day, and but for the gleam of her white dress in the leafy shadows Randal Ducie might not have seen her there when he was ushered into the library; after somewhat perfunctory greetings to her father and mother he strode, with the freedom of an acknowledged friend of the family, through the room into the sun-parlor and sat down beside her.
She was wearing a house dress of white wool, sparsely trimmed with only a band of Persian embroidery about the sleeves and belt and around the neck, which was cut in a high square, showing her delicate throat. She looked up embarrassed as he came in, conscious that she had on no guimpe, and no lace on the sleeves, and murmured something about not being fit to be seen. But in his masculine inexperience he perceived no lack in point of the finish of her attire, though the change of her countenance instantly struck his attention.
“Oh, what has happened?” he cried, solicitously. “What is the matter?”
“Nothing—nothing at all,” she replied, scarcely lifting her heavily lidded eyes. “I wish everybody would quit asking me that.”
“I can see that something is troubling you dreadfully,” he protested. “Won’t you let me help you? I could brush it away with one hand.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she declared, irritably.
For a few moments there was silence between them as he sat gazing at her pallid and listless face, with its downcast and dreary eyes, her languid, half-reclining attitude, her idle, nerveless hands clasped in her lap. The change in her was pathetic,—appealing.
“See here, Miss Dean, trust me; if you have stolen a horse, I will hide him for you.”
An unwilling smile crept to the verge of her drooping lips, but she ejaculated impatiently:
“Oh, nonsense!”