Three months after the child was born and died, Margery came back to Willowfield to spend a week at home. She came to see Susan, and they sat together in the tragic little bare room and talked. Though the girl had been so delicately pretty before she left home, Susan saw that she had become much prettier. She was dressed in light, softly tinted summer stuffs, and there was something about her which was curiously flower-like. Her long-lashed, harebell blue eyes seemed to have widened and grown lovelier in their innocent look. A more subtle mind than Susan Chapman’s might have said that she seemed to be looking farther into Life’s spaces, and that she was trembling upon the verge of something unknown and beautiful.
She talked about Boston and the happiness of her life there, and of her work and her guileless girlish hopes and ambitions.
“I am doing my very best,” she said, a spot of pink flickering on her cheek; “I work as hard as I can, but you see I am so ignorant. I could not have learned anything about art in Willowfield. But people are so good to me—people who know a great deal. There is one gentleman who comes sometimes to see Mr. Barnard at the studio. He is so wonderful, it seems to me. He has travelled, and knows all about the great galleries and the pictures in them. He talks so beautifully that everyone listens when he comes in. Nobody can bear to go on with work for fear of missing something. You would think he would not notice a plain little Willowfield girl, but he has been lovely to me, Susan. He has even looked at my work and criticised it for me, and talked to me. He nearly always talks to me a little when he comes in, and once I met him in the Gardens, and he stopped and talked there, and walked about looking at the flowers with me. They had been planting out the spring things, and it was like being in fairyland to walk about among them and hear the things he said about pictures. It taught me so much.”
She referred to this friend two or three times, and once mentioned his name, but Susan forgot it. She was such a beautiful, happy little thing, and seemed so exquisite an expression of spring-like, radiant youth and its innocent joy in living that the desolate and stranded creature she had befriended could think of nothing but her own awkward worship and the fascination of the flower-like charm. She used to sit and stare at her.
“Seems so queer to see anyone as happy an’ pretty as you,” she broke out once. “Oh, Lawsy, I hope nothing won’t ever come to spoil it. It hadn’t ought to be spoiled.”
A month or so later Margery paid a visit to her home again. She stayed a longer time, but Susan only saw her once. She had come home from Boston with a cold and had been put to bed for a day or two.
One morning Susan was in Willowfield and met her walking in a quiet street. She was walking slowly and looking down as she went, as if some thought was abstracting her. When Susan stopped before her, she looked up with a start. It was a start which revealed that she had been brought back suddenly from a distance, as it were a great distance.
“Oh, Susan!” she said. “Oh, Susan!”
She held out her hand in her pretty, affectionate way, but she was actually a little out of breath.
“I’m sorry I came on you so sudden,” Susan said, “I startled you.”