Was the visitor to be Mr. Banks? she asked herself. But she did not dare to put the question to her hostess.
One unprecedented occurrence signalized the occasion. The musty drawing-room was turned out, aired, and prepared for the reception of the visitor.
“Do take your work in there, and leave it about, and try to make the place look a little less like a charnel-house,” cried Mrs. Dale to Mabin that afternoon, when they had gone together to inspect the state apartment.
“It does look rather dreary certainly,” admitted Mabin. “But it won’t look so bad to any one who hasn’t been used, like us, to knowing it is always shut up.”
“That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that. However, I still beg you to drop a few bits of filoselle about, and to read a few books and strew them about. And I’ll run out and get some bits of copper beech and bracken to fill those yawning bowls. Flowers would be quite lost in them.”
“Not the peonies. They would look splendid!” Mabin called out after her, as the widow went out through the French window on to the gravel path outside.
It was already late in the afternoon, and, darkened as it was by the trees and shrubs which grew near the large windows, the room was so dimly lighted that Mabin took her work—it was still the cooking apron—to the window. It had required some self-control to take up a piece of work to which such recent memories were attached; and as she sewed, Mabin had great difficulty in keeping back the tears. Here were the very stitches Rudolph had put in, the very bag on which their fingers had closed together. She felt the thrill of that contact now.
And even as she let the apron fall into her lap, while the longing to hear his voice speak tender words in her ear stirred in her heart and made it beat fast, she heard his footstep on the gravel outside; she saw him pass the window.
Scarcely repressing the cry: “Rudolph! Rudolph!” which rose to her lips, she saw that he was hurrying across the grass without having seen her. And looking out of the window, she saw that Mrs. Dale was standing under the lime trees, holding out her hand to him with a smile of greeting.
And the look of confidence and pleasure which irradiated the widow’s face filled Mabin with despair.