“No, no dessert, thank you.” You couldn’t eat with your heart hammering like that, could you? She walked to the door. The rain was stopping, had almost entirely stopped. The key was upstairs, back in the drawer of her dressing table where she had replaced it after wringing it from Elsie yesterday. If she went for it now Elsie might hear and again weep her into a promise to keep away from the orchard house. The key had been only a matter of form, anyway. There were always the windows. Kate was sure they couldn’t all be locked. She would try getting in that way before she bothered about the key.
She glanced down at her rubber-soled canvas ties. No need for rubbers. No need for a sweater or umbrella, either: the little showers of rain blowing down from trees and bushes would do her chintz no harm.
She crossed the terrace, hoping neither Elsie nor Bertha was looking from a window overhead, and walked through the orchard straight to the orchard house. Before trying the windows, better try the door. That was only common sense. The latch lifted under her fingers! Had the house always stood open like this, and all that fuss about the key! She pushed the door softly open and went in.
“Something to do with fairies,” Elsie had said. Kate remembered the words as she crossed the threshold. And she felt surely as though it might easily have something to do with fairies; she might have been stepping into Fairyland itself for the eerie sensation that crossing the threshold gave her.
She left the door open behind her, and a gusty wet wind followed her like a companion. It filled the hall with the pungent scent of the syringa bush by the step.
There was nothing in the hall but a little oblong table standing against the wall at the foot of the stairs, a table with curly legs and a carved top on which stood an empty card tray, and hung above the table was a narrow long mirror in a gilded frame.
Kate looked into the mirror. How many, many times it had reflected her mother’s face. How very unlike Katherine her daughter was, hair bobbed so straight, rather slanting narrow eyes, full lips, freckles across the nose! Kate surveyed this image with her usual slight sense of annoyance upon meeting it in a mirror. She imagined Katherine, a Katherine of her own age, looking over her shoulder in the glass, their two heads together. It was the Katherine of the portrait, dark curly head, wide misty eyes, olive cheeks ever so delicately touched with rose.
Oh! Had that face actually gleamed out there for an instant? Her mental vision had been so clear that she could not be sure it had not, just for a flash, taken actual form.
Well, if the Katherine of sixteen years ago had joined her now and was going to accompany her in her exploration of the orchard house, so much the better. Kate had always longed for a girl comrade more than for anything else in the world. Come, let’s pretend she had one at last, Katherine at fifteen.
First the parlour. It opened on the right. The door stuck. Kate pushed with her knee and lifted up on the knob simultaneously. It opened explosively. And a door up in the second story somewhere opened in sympathy with it. Kate stood very still, listening. The jarring of the walls was the cause, of course; but even with this explanation accepted, it was creepy.