She crossed the room briskly, opened the door, smiled back over her shoulder, and stepped out into the dim, silent hall. It seemed to her that the house had grown terribly old, a pompous, dull old house. She went down the stairs slowly, for she was old, too. Her life was finished. Joyce was going away.
II
Hilda was serving breakfast in the basement dining room this morning, leaving the upper floor to the caterer’s men. That basement room had not been used since Joyce was a small girl and Mrs. Holland a young and very anxious mother. She had had no one to help her then except Hilda, and Hilda couldn’t be expected to go up and down stairs with the dishes.[Pg 410]
How different it had all been in those days—such a busy, eager sort of life, with herself and Hilda always doing something for the baby! She remembered other sunny mornings like this, and both of them in the kitchen, Hilda ironing little white dresses, while she prepared barley water for the precious bottles. Now there was a cook in the kitchen; a competent woman, but a trifle forbidding—a stranger, not a friend like Hilda. Everything was changed.
Frank was sitting at the table, a newspaper propped up before him.
“Oh, hello, Madeline!” he said with a vague sort of amiability. “How’s everything going, eh?”
“All right, thank you, Frank,” she replied, quietly.
As she sat down, he put aside the newspaper; but, after all, he found nothing to say. All he could think of this morning was Joyce, and he was afraid to mention her.
“Might upset Madeline,” he thought.
To be sure, it was a good many years since he had seen his wife at all upset. A quiet and dignified woman, she was, never at a loss; but this morning there was something about her that disquieted him.