“Sakes alive, Scipio, are you going to keep Miss Scarlett hanging around all day whiles you gossip about Sulphurville?” his wife asked. Aware of her husband’s enthusiasm for his native place, she may have foreseen a dissertation upon its wonders unless she were ruthless.
“Julie’ll take you up to his apartment. And don’t you forget to knock before you open the door, Julie.”
On the way up-stairs in the wake of the servant, Sylvia wondered how she should explain her intrusion to a stranger, even though he were an Englishman. She had so firmly decided to herself it was Arthur that she could not make any plans for meeting anybody else. Julie was quite ready to open the door of the bedroom and let Sylvia enter unannounced; she was surprised by being requested to go in first and ask the gentleman if he could receive Miss Scarlett. However, she yielded to foreign eccentricity, and a moment later ushered Sylvia in.
It was Arthur Madden; and Sylvia, from a mixture of penitence for the way she treated him at Colonial Terrace, of self-congratulation for being so sure beforehand that it was he, and from swift compassion for his illness and loneliness, ran across the room and greeted him with a kiss.
“How on earth did you get into this horrible hole?” Arthur asked.
“My dear, I knew it was you when I heard your name.” Breathlessly she poured out the story of how she had found him.
“But you’d made up your mind to play the Good Samaritan to whoever it was—you never guessed for a moment at first that it was me.”
She forgave him the faint petulance because he was ill, and also because it brought back to her with a new vividness long bygone jealousies, restoring a little more of herself as she once was, nearly thirteen years ago. How little he had changed outwardly, and much of what change there was might be put down to his illness.
“Arthur, do you remember Maria?” she asked.
He smiled. “He died only about two years ago. He lived with my mother after I went on the stage.”