An amazing change was there! The round table was covered with a fine damask cloth, and set out with gay, old-fashioned china, frail glassware, sturdy old plate, all gleaming in the light of the shaded lamp. On the walls hung two or three framed pictures, not masterpieces by any means, but somehow lovable and friendly.
“She’d like me to do this,” thought Rose. “For her children.”
Because, as she had unpacked these things from the boxes and barrels, such a strange feeling had come over her; she had felt that she understood that mother. Standing here now, surrounded by the perishable and infinitely touching belongings of that beloved woman, dead, but so tenderly remembered by all her children, she thought she knew how she had felt toward them all, how she had managed each one of them, wisely and patiently; how she had loved them for the qualities which were so splendid in them, and the faults that were only pitiful. And she wanted them to remember their mother, not in bitterness and grief, but happily, as if always conscious of her dear spirit.
A sound startled her; a noise like little feet running over the tarred paper on the roof. At first she thought, with no great comfort, that it was rats, but then the pattering came upon the windowpanes, against the door. It was rain.
“Nina!” she thought. “What can be keeping her so late!”
She went into the kitchen and opened the back door; the summer rain was driving down with steady violence, drumming loud on the roof now, spattering up from the path. Such a dark, strange world for Nina to be out in alone! Moved by a sudden impulse, she ran out into the rain and entered their own house; the lamp still burned clear and steady in the neat little room. The clock struck six.
“Oh, Nina!” she cried, aloud, in an unreasoning panic of fear. “Nina, darling!”
And then, above all the noise of the rain, she heard a familiar sound, the slam of a door by which all the Morgans announced their home coming. She hurried back there, her courage, her generous hopes, all gone now.
“I’m an officious busybody!” she thought. “Why didn’t I stay at home and mind my own affairs? Oh, I wish I’d let the Morgans alone! I wish—”
She stopped short in the kitchen doorway, staring at Gilbert. He was wearing a dinner jacket, and it was soaked through with rain; his collar was wilted, his tie askew, his fair hair plastered across his forehead, his blue eyes very brilliant. And his face, his clear-featured, handsome young face, so white, so strained, so lamentably changed! The momentary disgust she had felt turned to a painful compassion.