Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later—the interval was “decent”—Mr. Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs. Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed. Charles Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had been ups and downs, and intervals of hope when none could have criticised his wife for seeing her friends, her door had been barred against everyone. She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day, the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of ill-health and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were agreed that she was behaving with propriety.
She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it, at the first moment, to fit his robust and splendid person into the region of twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited. She was beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But she gave him her hand without perceptible reluctance.
He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion required him to release it.
“Well—you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.
“Patient? Yes. What else was there to be?” she rejoined with a faint smile, as he seated himself beside her, a little too near.
“Oh, well ... of course! I understood all that, I hope you’ll believe. But mightn’t you at least have answered my letters—one or two of them?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t write.”
“Not to anyone? Or not to me?” he queried, with ironic emphasis.