She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds.
"I don't know. I wanted to surprise you—and, by George! I've surprised myself. It's beautiful. It's all just as it used to be, Dolly."
The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be.
"I'll tell them you're staying for lunch."
She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to catch strongly at her lost composure.
If anyone had had the right to ask the reason of her agitation, and had asked it, Dorothea would have said that the sudden happening of anything was enough to upset one in whose life nothing ever happened. But no one had the right.
She went into the kitchen to give the necessary orders.
"Not the mince," she said; "or, stay. Yes, that would do, too. You must cook the fowl that was for to-night's dinner—and Jane can go down to the village for something else for to-night. And salad and raspberries. And I will put out some wine. My cousin, Mr. Courtenay, has come home from India. He will lunch with me."
"Master Bob," said the cook, as the kitchen door closed, "well, if I ever did! He's a married man by this time, with young folkses growing up around him, I shouldn't wonder. He never did look twice the same side of the road where she was. Poor Miss Dolly!"
Most of us are mercifully ignorant of the sympathy that surrounds us.