The miniature was of a sweet-faced girl with large loving childish eyes, and cheeks that blushed like the early morning. Clorinda looked at her almost with tenderness.
“There is no marrying or giving in marriage, ’tis said,” quoth she; “but were there, ’tis you who were his wife—not I. I was but a lighter thing, though I bore his name and he honoured me. When you and your child greet him he will forget me—and all will be well.”
She held the miniature and the soft hair to his cold lips a moment, and Anne saw with wonder that her own mouth worked. She slipped the ring on his least finger, and hid the picture and the ringlets within the palms of his folded hands.
“He was a good man,” she said; “he was the first good man that I had ever known.” And she held out her hand to Anne and drew her from the room with her, and two crystal tears fell upon the bosom of her black robe and slipped away like jewels.
When the funeral obsequies were over, the next of kin who was heir came to take possession of the estate which had fallen to him, and the widow retired to her father’s house for seclusion from the world. The town house had been left to her by her deceased lord, but she did not wish to return to it until the period of her mourning was over and she laid aside her weeds. The income the earl had been able to bestow upon her made her a rich woman, and when she chose to appear again in the world it would be with the power to mingle with it fittingly.
During her stay at her father’s house she did much to make it a more suitable abode for her, ordering down from London furnishings and workmen to set her own apartments and Anne’s in order. But she would not occupy the rooms she had lived in heretofore. For some reason it seemed to be her whim to have begun to have an enmity for them. The first day she entered them with Anne she stopped upon the threshold.
“I will not stay here,” she said. “I never loved the rooms—and now I hate them. It seems to me it was another woman who lived in them—in another world. ’Tis so long ago that ’tis ghostly. Make ready the old red chambers for me,” to her woman; “I will live there. They have been long closed, and are worm-eaten and mouldy perchance; but a great fire will warm them. And I will have furnishings from London to make them fit for habitation.”
The next day it seemed for a brief space as if she would have changed even from the red chambers.
“I did not know,” she said, turning with a sudden movement from a side window, “that one might see the old rose garden from here. I would not have taken the room had I guessed it. It is too dreary a wilderness, with its tangle of briars and its broken sun-dial.”
“You cannot see the dial from here,” said Anne, coming towards her with a strange paleness and haste. “One cannot see within the garden from any window, surely.”