When she had gained her own room she stood among her scattered possessions, thinking. No one knew how terrifying her loneliness seemed to her. As she looked out at it now, so close at hand, to begin to-morrow, her heart sickened, and the bleakness of an encompassing world, all strange, all cold, all uncaring, seemed to encircle her. Were not protection, companionship, home, at any price, better than this? She recalled the young man’s coarse but good-natured face, his passion shining through the businesslike phlegm of his manner, and uttered a vehement exclamation, at the same time making a gesture as though repulsing him. There were some things that even to a woman in her position were impossible.
The next day she started, turning her back on her father’s grave, and her face toward the city where she had been born and yet had not a friend.
Had Mrs. Cassidy heard this stricture upon her lonely condition, she would have hotly denied it. Mrs. Cassidy told Viola that she would be at once a mother and a father to her, and Micky Cassidy, her son, would fill the various positions of male relations that, in Miss Reed’s case, were as yet untenanted. The impulsive widow did her best to make the girl feel at home, and certainly offered Viola the consolation of shedding many tears with her, and of lauding the colonel’s good qualities till even the girl’s dulled emotions were roused, and she wept as she had not done since her father’s death.
But her home-coming was sharpened with pangs that she had not reckoned on when her first longing to return to the city swept over her. Every step of her surroundings was reminiscent of her father and of their close companionship. All the byways held recollections of him, of small happenings that, at the time, had been pregnant with joy or anxiety, of little jokes they had had together. The shops they dealt at seemed as if they might at any moment disgorge his tall, angular figure, with its quick, decisive step, the old face alight with smiles as his eye fell on her.
One afternoon, after she had been home a week, she was returning from a walk, slowly traversing the familiar streets, absorbed in her own thoughts. So engrossed was she that, for the moment, the Sacramento interval, with all that it had held, was obliterated from her mind, and, walking loiteringly, she turned the accustomed corner and approached the house. Her suspension of memory lasted till she had her hand on the gate. Then, with a sudden, dizzying rush, the consciousness of the present returned. She felt faint and sick, and stood holding the gate-post and looking up at the house with a frightened face. When she had mastered herself she went home to her room at Mrs. Cassidy’s and locked herself in. Mrs. Cassidy knocked at her door three times that evening, but Viola would not open it, even when the widow, through the keyhole, extolled the merits of the tea she had waiting on the tray.
The next day Viola appeared to be herself, though she looked white and listless, and Mrs. Cassidy resolved to impart to her a piece of information that, with great effort of will, she had been hoarding up to cheer a particularly dark hour. It was her habit to bring Viola her tea at six, and during this meal to seat herself and discourse with her lodger in a friendly and cheering spirit. The widow loved a gossip, and it seemed to her that Miss Reed was a person more redolent of romance than any one she had ever known before.
Rocking comfortably back and forth in the plush-covered, ribbon-decked rocking-chair, she watched her lodger as she poured out her tea, and delicately, after the manner of people who are without appetite, broke small fragments off her roll and put them in her mouth. Then, in a voice vibrating with secret exultation, she said:
“You won’t always feel so bad as this, honey. Things cheer up sooner ’n we expect, and black clouds have silver linin’s. Besides, there’s friends of yours that wouldn’t let you want for nothin’, if they knew you was back.”
She saw the piece of roll stop midway between Viola’s mouth and the plate, and her eyes fix themselves on the lid of the tea-pot in an arrested stare.