When she faced the family there were black circles around her eyes. They were the eyes of a woman grown, and they looked out upon the world with sorrow in them for the first time.
VII
LOVE IN SEVERAL ASPECTS
It was not long before the community was talking of the change in Hilda, the abrupt change to a gentle, serious, silent woman, the sparkle gone from her eyes, pathos there in its stead. But not even her own family knew her secret.
"When is Mr. Feuerstein coming again?" asked her father when a week had passed.
"I don't know just when. Soon," answered Hilda, in a tone which made it impossible for such a man as he to inquire further.
Sophie brought all her cunning to bear in her effort to get at the facts. But Hilda evaded her hints and avoided her traps. After much thinking she decided that Mr. Feuerstein had probably gone for good, that Hilda was hoping when there was nothing to hope for, and that her own affairs were suffering from the cessation of action. She was in the mood to entertain the basest suggestions her craft could put forward for making marriage between Hilda and Otto impossible. But she had not yet reached the stage at which overt acts are deliberately planned upon the surface of the mind.
One of her girl friends ran in to gossip with her late in the afternoon of the eighth day after Mr. Feuerstein's "parting scene" in Tompkins Square. The talk soon drifted to Hilda, whom the other girl did not like.
"I wonder what's become of that lover of hers—that tall fellow from up town?" asked Miss Hunneker.