But as Cooper bustled about with the preparations of the tea, she began to consider what she really expected. She was quite undismayed at what she had done, and was on that score willing to confront any stone faces that might be-Gorgon her, but her imagination could not picture what she was going to do. Would she live here perdue for the next six months till the family of stone brought their Pharaoh-presence into London again? She could not imagine that. Was it to come, then, to the threatened barrel-organ and the monkey and the telling of fortunes? Glib and ready as had been her speech on that subject, it lacked reality when seriously contemplated in the mirror of the future.
But if she was not proposing to live here with Cooper, or to run away definitely—a prospect for which, at the age of fifteen, she felt herself, now that it grimly stared her in the face, wholly unripe—there was nothing to be done, but to-day or to-morrow, or on one of the conceivable to-morrows, to go back again. And yet her whole nature revolted against that.
She was sitting in the window-seat of the big hall as this dismal debate went on in her head, but all the parties to that conference were agreed on one thing—namely, that Cooper should not telegraph to her mother, and that, come what might, Cooper should not be imagined to be an accomplice. Just then she heard a step on the threshold outside, and simultaneously the welcome jingle of a tea-tray from the opposite direction. Hester tiptoed towards the latter of these sounds, and found Cooper laden with good things on a tray advancing up the corridor.
“Go back to your room, Cooper,” she whispered; “there is some one at the door. I will see who it is.”
“Eh, now, let me open the door,” said Cooper, visibly apprehensive.
“No! Go away!” whispered Hester, and remained there during imperative peals of the bell till Cooper had vanished.
She tried, by peeping sideways out of the hall window, to arrive at the identity of this impatient visitor, but could see nothing of him. Then, with cold courage, she went to the front-door and opened it. She expected something bad—her mother, perhaps, or her brothers’ tutor, or the groom of the chambers—but she had conjectured nothing so bad as this, for on the doorstep stood her father.
That formidable figure was not often encountered by her. In London she practically never saw him at all; in the country she saw him but once a day, when, with the rest of the family, she waited in the drawing-room before dinner for his entrance with her mother. Then they all stood up, and paired off to go in to dinner. In some remote manner Hester felt that she had no existence for him, but that he, at close quarters, had a terrible existence for her. Generally, he took no notice whatever of her, but to-day she realised that she existed for him in so lively a manner that he had come up from Stanier to get into touch with her. Such courage as she had completely oozed out of her: she had become just a stone out of the family quarry.
“So you’re here,” he said, shutting the door behind him.
“Yes,” said Hester.