He made no reply, but covered his face with his hands, and sat silent and motionless. Meanwhile the boat glided up to the landing-place, and they disembarked.
“I thought the girls would have been here to meet us,” said Miss Grainger, with a pique she could not repress; but Calvert walked along at her side, and made no answer.
“I think you know your way here,” said she with a smile, as she motioned him towards the drawing-room.
CHAPTER XXI. THE RETURN.
WHEN Calvert found himself alone in the drawing-room, he felt as if he had never been away. Everything was so exactly as he left it There was the sofa drawn close to the window of the flower-garden where Florence used to recline; there the little work-table with the tall glass that held her hyacinths, the flowers she was so fond of; there the rug for her terrier to lie on. Yonder, under the fig-tree, hung the cage with her favourite canary; and here were the very books she used to read long ago—Petrarch and Tennyson and Uhland. There was a flower to mark a place in the volume of Uhland, and it was at a little poem they had once read together. How full of memories are these old rooms, where we have dreamed away some weeks of life, if not in love, in something akin to it, and thus more alive to the influences of externals than if further gone in the passion! There was not a spot, not a chair, nor a window-seat that did not remind Calvert of some incident of the past. He missed his favourite song, “A place in thy memory, dearest,” from the piano, and he sought for it and put it back where it used to be; and he then went over to her table to arrange the books as they were wont to be long ago, and came suddenly upon a small morocco case. He opened it It was a miniature of Loyd, the man he hated the most on earth. It was an ill done portrait, and gave an affected thoughtfulness and elevation to his calm features which imparted insufferable pretension to them; Calvert held out the picture at arm’s length, and laughed scornfully as he looked at it. He had but time to lay it down on the table when Emily entered the room. She approached him hurriedly, and with an agitated manner. “Oh, Colonel Calvert—” she began.
“Why not Harry, brother Harry, as I used to be, Milly dearest,” said he, as he caught her hand in both his own. “What has happened to forfeit for me my old place in your esteem?”
“Nothing, nothing, but all is so changed; you have grown to be such a great man, and we have become lost to all that goes on in the world.”
“And where is your sister, will she not come to see me?”
“You startled her, you gave her such a shock, when you stood up in the boat and returned her salute, that she was quite overcome, and has gone to her room. Aunt Grainger is with her, and told me to say—that is, she hoped, if you would not take it ill, or deem it unkind—”