But Mrs. Pembury was too much disturbed to reply. Hastily leaving the room with some excuse, she went straight to her husband, who was in his surgery, and laid the paper before him.
“What do you think of that?” she asked in consternation. “I’d always had an idea it was something that happened while she was there that prevented Rhoda’s marrying, and now I’m sure of it. I believe she fell in love with Sir Robert’s ward, Mr. Rotherfield.”
But Dr. Pembury thought this idea high-flown and far-fetched, and said he could not see any likelihood of such a thing. Rhoda would have betrayed herself before this if she had nourished a passion for so long, and in any case, it did not matter, as it was more than likely that Sir Robert had left the Mill-house by this time, since his wife appeared to be always in London, or, if not, that Mr. Rotherfield had settled down somewhere else with a wife of his own.
Mrs. Pembury was troubled, but she always submitted, even against her better judgment, to her husband’s wishes, and in this case it was not even her judgment, but only a sort of feminine instinct, which told her that Rhoda had strong sentimental reasons for wishing to take this step.
On the following day, therefore, Rhoda, who was now twenty-seven, and better capable of looking after herself than she had been at seventeen, started alone for Dourville, and presented herself, early in the afternoon, at the house she remembered so well.
Emotion made her eyes fill and her limbs tremble as she approached the house, and recognised that it had undergone such changes, since she first knew it, that she could scarcely be sure she had not made a mistake and come to the wrong gate, when she found herself standing before a long, white house, with wings extending far in each direction, and with the modern big, wide windows replacing the little narrow old ones.
Many of the trees that had surrounded the old house so closely had been cut down, with considerable advantage as regards light, but at a great loss of picturesqueness. Gone was the cosy, old-fashioned look, together with the dark red curtains, the heavy square portico, the homely look that she had loved.
It was into a stately, handsome hall that she was shown, a room having been sacrificed to enlarge the entrance; and when she found herself following a footman across a wide expanse of parquetted floor to a new part of the building, and ushered into a lofty, light library, Rhoda was almost ready to believe that she had made a mistake, and that the Sir Robert, who would, so the footman said, see her at once, could not be the man who had saved her life, the memory of whose kindness she had treasured in secret for so long, the man whose image had, almost unknown to herself, so effectually shut out that of every other man from her heart during these ten years.
But there he was, not indeed the Sir Robert she remembered, but perfectly recognisable to her, although the dark hair had become thickly streaked with grey, and the face more deeply lined than that of a man of forty-five ought to be.
She had felt her heart beating very fast as she was led towards the library, but she was totally unprepared for the reception she met.