After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage, she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising, breathless, moist heat.
Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother’s room. She was looking forward to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone, because she had been at home too short a time to have received any letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day before by her mother’s competent hands, which had also arranged every detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.
Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in prolonged meditation.
In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.
Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. “Hush! Don’t make any more noise than you can help. Mother’s still asleep.” At his gaze of stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, “Why, I always seem to strike you speechless. What’s the matter with me now?”
The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of her tone, “I was wondering if I oughtn’t to apologize to you—if I should ever see you again—for being so curt this morning. And then you spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do. I’m very sorry.”
They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional situation, but, in spite of this, the young man’s apology was not without the accent of serious sincerity.
Lydia responded heartily in kind. “Oh, it was I who was horrid. And—wasn’t it funny—I was just thinking—wondering if I should ever have a chance to try to make you see that I didn’t mean to be so—” she hesitated, and fell back on iteration again—“so horrid.”
The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, “Oh, you were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh. I’m sorry.”
She challenged his sincerity, “Are you really, really?”