He knew that she was not expected at Tanglewood until the first of October; for so the judge had informed him in a letter that he had received the very night before he left Washington. And this was only the first of September; and he intended to give himself but two weeks' holiday and to be back at his office by the fourteenth at farthest, full sixteen days before the expected arrival of Lord and Lady Vincent at Tanglewood.
Yet this dread of meeting Claudia haunted him. His love was dead; but as he had told Bee, it had died hard and rent his heart in its death-struggles, and that heart was sore to the touch of her presence.
The judge's letter wherein he had spoken of the date of his daughter and son-in-law's visit had been written several days previous to this evening, and since that, news might have come from them, speaking of some change of plan, involving an earlier visit.
These Ishmael felt were the mere chimeras of imagination. Still he thought he would inquire concerning the family at Tanglewood.
"They are all well up at the house, I hope, Uncle Reuben?" he asked.
"Famous! And having everything shined up bright as a new shilling, in honor of the arrival of my lord and my lady, who are expected, come first o' next mont'."
"On the first of October? Are you sure?"
"On the first of October, sharp! Not a day earlier or later! I was up to the house yes'day afternoon, just afore you come; and sure enough the judge, he had just got a letter from the young madam,—my lady, I mean,—in which she promised not to disappoint him, but to be at Tanglewood punctually on the first of October to a day!"
Reuben, a hard-working man, who was "early to bed and early to rise," concluded this speech with such an awful, uncompromising yawn that Ishmael immediately took up and lighted his bedroom candle, bid them all good-night, and retired.
He was once more in the humble little attic room where he had first chanced upon a set of old law books and imbibed a taste for the legal profession.