“Good-by,” she said, turning to follow her daughter’s movements with a waiting, dependent eye, “won’t you come again before you go?”
He murmured an assent from the top steps, but he would leave in a day or two at the longest.
“The girls like seeing you so much;” now she looked at him with some animation. “And they have so little pleasure.”
“Why, mother,” said Rosamund in half-laughing protest, “that sounds as if Colonel Parrish was a sort of circus, just here to amuse us.”
The Colonel was nearly at the bottom of the steps. With some last conventional sentences of farewell, he raised his hat and turned toward mother and daughter for a final glance. They were smiling at Rosamund’s words, both looking at him to return his bow with perfunctory politeness. When he turned from them he could hear their voices, low and full of a close and different form of interest, speaking of the adjustment of the invalid’s shawls, the window by which her chair should be placed.
He was half-way down the path to the gate when a sound of suppressed singing caught his ear. Turning in its direction he saw coming down through a narrow path in the chaparral a fine red and white cow, and following it, June Allen. She was singing in a crooning, absent-minded way, at intervals flicking the flanks of the cow with a long alder branch she carried, stripped of all its leaves save two at the top. As she approached him she stopped singing, struck the cow with the branch, and began in a thoughtful way to talk to herself.
The attraction she had exercised over him fell on him again the moment he saw her. The very way she appeared to be conversing to herself seemed to him to be imbued with a quaint, unconscious charm, such as a child possesses. With his mind full of the gloom and pain of his interview with Alice, he yet paused, eying the approaching figure. As he stood watching her, she looked up and saw him.
She gave a loud exclamation and her face became illumined with pleasure. Administering to the cow a smart stroke with her switch, she crowded by it and ran forward over the dry grass into which the verdure of the garden intruded.
“Oh, how lovely for me to meet you!” she cried as she came up to him with an extended hand. “I never thought I’d have such luck.”
Her hand nestled into his; her face smiling at him was charged with an almost fond delight.