Kate closed the door behind her as though by accident. But Elsie was not in the room. Kate looked all around but it was quite empty. The vanishing comrade had vanished, physically this time. There was the closet door. Was she hiding there? Yes, Kate heard a stir and saw dimly through the hanging dresses—expensive dresses given Elsie by Aunt Katherine, which she was not taking with her—Elsie herself squeezed back against the farthest wall. Kate closed the closet door behind her and groped her way across the dark closet. “It’s I, Kate,” she whispered loudly.
The girls touched hands in the dark. They hugged and kissed each other, mostly on noses and ears, but no matter; it was a grief-stricken parting. “Good-bye, good-bye,” they whispered, and Kate said, “Write to me from California.” But she must hurry back before it came into Miss Frazier’s head to follow her in here with the idea of going through Elsie’s door into the hall. She ran back to her own room and in her anxiety created the impression of a small cyclone appearing.
Miss Frazier looked with some surprise on the violence of her return. Then her eyes softened. Kate had not given thought to drying her tears. “You mustn’t take it like this,” Aunt Katherine said, putting her arm through Kate’s as they went down the passageways together toward the big upper hall. “Elsie is happier than she has been in a very long time; she is off with one of the most satisfying companions in the world. Nick will take good care of her, infinitely better care than was ever taken here by me, for he knows her mind. And oh, Kate, we mustn’t let your mother run away with you, too. Then I should be alone! You won’t be without companionship. There are the Dentons just next door, and plenty of others who will be wanting to know you now.”
“But they aren’t Elsie,” Kate responded, shamelessly using her handkerchief, as the tears would keep flooding.
CHAPTER XXI
LIKE THE STARS
Miss Frazier was too excitedly nervous to take up a book or knitting when they were in the drawing-room. She wandered about, looking at the pictures on the walls, picking up magazines from tables to stare at them vacantly and replace them again, changing the arrangements of flowers, and all the time she was waiting for the sound of the opening front door and Katherine’s step in the hall. Kate was listening, too, but not in that direction. She expected her mother to come through the gardens and in at one of the French doors, closed now, with the rain beating against them. Kate was so absorbed with the consciousness of Elsie waiting up on the stair landing for her chance to escape that she forgot her mother had no umbrella and that she might be waiting in the orchard house until this particular shower passed. She merely wondered what was keeping her all this time, and what would happen when she and Aunt Katherine met. Aunt Katherine would certainly be surprised when she caught sight of the expected traveller through the glass doors on the terrace. There would be questions and explanations about that. Nick would have warned Katherine, of course, not to give away the secret of his being there; but then what would she give as her explanation to Aunt Katherine?
Would she be expecting to find Aunt Katherine here at all, though? Wouldn’t Nick have acquainted her with the fact of Aunt Katherine’s supposed absence? In that case Katherine, unprepared, would be hard put to it to give any excuse for entering through the gardens from the back, rather than by the front door, ushered in by Isadora. Kate was on tenter-hooks. She felt that it was she herself who had caused the muddle. But what could she have done differently? If she had told Aunt Katherine, up in her room, that Katherine was here already, only out in the orchard house, Aunt Katherine would certainly have gone straight out there, and then what would have happened to Nick and Elsie?
It was a bad ten minutes for Kate. She sat with a book open before her—what book she never knew—her eyes glued to the page, her ears cocked for a sound beyond the glass doors. Aunt Katherine stopped before her in her wanderings once or twice, about to speak, but she had too much respect for a reader to break into such obvious absorption as was Kate’s.
Now Miss Frazier was standing looking through the glass of one of the doors into the rain-swept garden. Kate was seized with an idea. She must run up to Elsie in the window seat—she must manage it without her aunt’s noticing, now—and send Elsie to the orchard house to warn those two that Miss Frazier had returned. After that, responsibility would be theirs. They might fix up some scheme among them. Kate rose, softly, and took a step toward the hall. But she was halted by an exclamation from Aunt Katherine.
Miss Frazier had not turned; she was still looking out through the glass. Kate, looking, too, saw two figures just at the edge of the orchard. It was her mother and Nick. Well, she could do nothing now. They certainly were counting on Aunt Katherine’s absence, for they were coming toward the house. They were running toward the house, “between the drops,” dashing like school children. They were holding hands, and Nick was always a step ahead, rather dragging Katherine. Oh, why hadn’t Kate thought about an umbrella! They were laughing! Kate heard their laughter through the glass. So did Aunt Katherine. Her face, taken at that moment, would have made a perfect mask to personify Surprise.