"Why was I not written to? Why was I not sent for, if Uncle is ill?" cried Dolores, with so much distress in her face, that Helena, accustomed to the usual calm of her friend's demeanor, looked upon her with surprise.
Daniel's assurance that his master was not sick, "only ailin'," did not remove the cloud from Dolores' face until they reached the mansion, which seemed to Helena, filled with a "well-bred gloom," as she afterwards expressed it.
As a garment becomes impregnated with the odors of the body, so the atmosphere of a house becomes saturated with the essence or the spiritual nature of its inhabitants. In Helena Maxon's own home, humble and modest though it was, who ever crossed its threshold felt the rush of a vitalized current of love and good cheer, like a soft breeze about him.
And with her peculiarly sensitive nature she felt, like a finely organized human barometer, the cold and chilling atmosphere of this mansion: and her spiritual mercury ran down to the zeros.
A tall, grave man, with a clear-cut, beardless face and steel gray eyes, met them in the hall, "Welcome home, young ladies," he said, while the phantom of a smile played over his pale features, as a winter sunbeam falls on a marble statue. "I am glad to see you both. Dolores, child, you look pale; are you ill?"
He took her hand, as he had taken Helena's, and he offered no more affectionate greeting, nor did Dolores.
"No—I am well," she said, "only Daniel frightened me: he said you were very unwell. You should have sent for me, Uncle, at once."
"It was not necessary, child," replied her uncle, as he led them down the long hall and stood aside to let them pass up the broad stairway. "I have only been indisposed, as I always am in the Spring, you know. Why should I take you from your studies because my liver is refractory? But hasten, now, young ladies. You have only time to make your toilet before dinner is served."
"I heard two robins chirping in a bare tree this morning," Mr. Laurence said, as the young ladies took their places at the table a little later. "That and your youthful voices in the lonely old hall just now, convinced me of the near approach of Springtime. Happy birds, and happy girls, I said. I wonder what the brief summer of life holds for you?
"What is your dream of the future, Miss Maxon?"