There were the servants to bid good-by, and that being done there was no excuse to linger.
It was a warm May day; the magnolia in the yard, the pirus japonicas, the calycanthus, the horse chestnuts, were in bloom. The lawn was green, the edges of the gravel paths were newly cut and trim. Alexina, in her muslin dress and Leghorn hat, turned on the stone flagging and looked back at the home she was leaving. Home?
The girl, pausing in the yard of the big house, glanced across the street to a shabby old brick cottage. Her affection was for it.
The hotel was in the business part of the city near the river. A street-car would have taken her directly there but she walked, as if seeking to put the moment off. The way took her past the house furnished and waiting for Aunt Harriet and the Major. Louise was sitting on an up-stairs window-sill with little Stevie, and caught his small fist and waved it to her. A curtain was fluttering out an opened window and a comfortable looking coloured woman was sweeping the pavement. The place had an air of relaxation, of comfort, already. Aunt Harriet was going to have a home.
The arrangements had been made at the hotel, and the child, for a very child she was, went in at the ladies’ entrance where a sleepy bell-boy sat, always nodding, past the pillared corridor, on up-stairs, and along the crimson-carpeted hallways. She was trembling, her throat was dry.
In the suite she had taken, a bed-room either side opened into a connecting parlour. It was the knob of the parlour door she turned after a tap. Then she went in.
“Why, you tall, charming, baby-faced—! Celeste, Celeste, here’s your baby! Come here to me, Malise. Why the child’s hands are cold!”
How foolish to have dreaded it so! It was all gone—even the constraint. The twelve years were as nothing. She was again the baby child, Malise, so-called by her mother’s people.
And her mother? The linen pillows on the sofa beneath her head looked cool and pleasantly rumpled, and the sheer white wrapper was fine and softly laundered as a baby’s. Her hair, hanging in two plaits over the pillows, had no suggestion of carelessness; it looked fascinating, it looked lovely.
The mother, holding her daughter’s hands, was gazing up curiously, interestedly, her lips parted, as pleased interest will part any child’s. There was contagious laughter in the eyes, too, the laugh of expectancy about to be gratified, as with children while the curtain goes up on a new scene. “You are as pretty as you can be, Malise; the Blair features used to look so solemn on a baby!”