On the opposite side a carriage had stopped; the footman opened the door, and a servant came from the house to assist its occupant. Anne's eyes by chance were resting upon the group. She saw a lady lifted to the pavement; then saw her slowly ascend the house steps, while a maid followed with shawls and wraps. It was Helen. Anne's eyes recognized her instantly. She was unchanged—proud, graceful, and exquisitely attired as ever, in spite of her slow step and need of assistance. Involuntarily the girl opposite had paused; then, recovering herself, she drew down her veil and walked on, her heart beating rapidly, her breath coming in throbs. But no one had noticed her. Helen was already within the house, and the servant was closing the door; then the footman came down the steps, sprang up to his place, and the carriage rolled away.
She went on to her pupil's residence, and, quietly as she could, asked, upon the first opportunity, her question.
"A lady who was assisted up the steps? Oh yes, I know whom you mean; it is Mrs. Ward Heathcote," replied the girl-pupil. "Isn't she too lovely! Did you see her face?"
"Yes. Does she live in that house?"
"I am delighted to say that she does. She used to live with her aunt, Miss Teller, but it seems that she inherited this old house over here from her grandfather, who died not long ago, and she has taken a fancy to live in it. Of course I think all her fancies are seraphic, and principally this one, since it has brought her near us. I look at her half the time; just gaze and gaze!" Cora was sixteen, and very pretty; she talked in the dialect of her age and set. Launched now on a favorite topic, she rushed on, while the teacher, with downcast eyes, listened, and rolled and unrolled the sheet of music in her hands. Mrs. Heathcote's beauty; Mrs. Heathcote's wealth; Mrs. Heathcote's wonderful costumes; Mrs. Heathcote's romantic marriage, after a fall from her carriage; Mrs. Heathcote's husband, "chivalrously in the army, with a pair of eyes, Miss Douglas, which, I do assure you, are—well, murderously beautiful is not a word to express it! Not that he cares. The most indifferent person! Still, if you could see them, you would know what I mean." Cora told all that she knew, and more than she knew. The two households had no acquaintance, Anne learned; the school-girl had obtained her information from other sources. There would, then, be no danger of discovery in that way. The silent listener could not help listening while Cora said that Captain Heathcote had not returned home since his first departure; that he had been seriously ill somewhere in the West, but having recovered, had immediately returned to his regiment without coming home on furlough, as others always did, after an illness, or even the pretense of one, which conduct Cora considered so "perfectly grand" that she wondered "the papers" did not "blazon it aloft." At last even the school-girl's volubility and adjectives were exhausted, and the monologue came to an end. Then the teacher gave her lesson, and the words she had heard sounded in her ears like the roar of the sea in a storm—it seemed as though she must be speaking loudly in order to drown it. But her pupil noticed nothing, save that Miss Douglas was more quiet than usual, and perhaps more pale. When she went away, she turned eastward, in order not to pass the house a second time—the house that held Helen. But she need not have taken the precaution; hers was not a figure upon which the eyes of Mrs. Heathcote would be likely to dwell. In the city, unfashionable attire is like the ring of Gyges, it renders the wearer, if not invisible, at least unseen.
That night she could not sleep; she could do nothing but think of Helen, Helen, her once dearly loved friend—Helen, his wife. She knew that she must give up this new danger, and she knew also that she loved the danger—these chances of a glimpse of Helen, Helen's home, and—yes, it might be, at some future time, Helen's husband. But she conquered herself again. In the morning she wrote a note to Cora's mother, saying that she found herself unable to continue the lessons; as Cora had the manuscript music-books which Dr. Douglas had himself prepared for his daughter when she was a little girl on the island, she added that she would come for them on Monday, and at the same time take leave of her pupil, from whom she parted with regret.
Saturday and Sunday now intervened. At the choir rehearsal on Saturday a foreboding came over her; occult malign influences seemed hovering in the air. The tenor and organist, the opposition party, were ominously affable. In this church there was, as in many another, an anomalous "music committee," composed apparently of vestrymen, but in reality of vestrymen's wives. These wives, spurred on secretly by the tenor and organist, had decided that Miss Douglas was not the kind of soprano they wished to have. She came into the city by train on the Sabbath day; she was dressed so plainly and unfashionably that it betokened a want of proper respect for the congregation; in addition, and in spite of this plain attire, there was something about her which made "the gentlemen turn and look at her." This last was the fatal accusation. Poor Anne could not have disproved these charges, even if she had known what they were; but she did not. Her foreboding of trouble had not been at fault however, for on Monday morning came a formal note of dismissal, worded with careful politeness; her services would not be required after the following Sunday. It was a hard blow. But the vestrymen's wives preferred the other candidate (friend of the organist and tenor), who lived with her mother in the city, and patronized no Sunday trains; whose garments were nicely adjusted to the requirements of the position, following the fashions carefully indeed, but at a distance, and with chastened salaried humility as well; who sang correctly, but with none of that fervor which the vestrymen's wives considered so "out of place in a church"; and whose face certainly had none of those outlines and hues which so reprehensibly attracted "the attention of the gentlemen." And thus Anne was dismissed.
It was a bitterly cold morning. The scantily furnished rooms of the half-house looked dreary and blank; old Nora, groaning with rheumatism, sat drawn up beside the kitchen stove. Anne, who had one French lesson to give, and the farewell visit to make at the residence of Mrs. Iverson, Cora's mother, went in to the city. She gave the lesson, and then walked down to the Scheffels' lodging to bear the dark tidings of her dismissal. The musical instrument maker's window was frosted nearly to the top; but he had made a round hole inside with a hot penny, and he was looking through it when Anne rang the street bell. It was startling to see a human eye so near, isolated by the frost-work—an eye and nothing more; but she was glad he could amuse himself even after that solitary fashion. Herr Scheffel had not returned from his round of lessons. Anne waited some time in the small warm crowded room, where growing plants, canary-birds, little plaster busts of the great musicians, the piano, and the stove crowded each other cheerfully, but he did not come. Mrs. Scheffel urged her to remain all night. "It ees zo beetter cold." But Anne took leave, promising to come again on the morrow. It was after four o'clock, and darkness was not far distant; the piercing wind swept through the streets, blowing the flinty dust before it; the ground was frozen hard as steel. She made her farewell visit at Mrs. Iverson's, took her music-books, and said good-by, facing the effusive regrets of Cora as well as she could, and trying not to think how the money thus relinquished would be doubly needed now. Then she went forth into the darkening street, the door of the warm, brightly lighted home closing behind her like a knell. She had chosen twilight purposely for this last visit, in order that she might neither see nor be seen. She shivered now as the wind struck her, clasped the heavy books with one arm, and turned westward on her way to the railway station. It seemed to her that the city held that night no girl so desolate as herself.
As she was passing the street lamp at the first corner, some one stopped suddenly. "Good heavens! Miss Douglas—Anne—is that you?" said a voice. She looked up. It was Gregory Dexter.