She had done a rash and daring thing in coming back to Dearborn County. It had seemed the right thing to do, and she had found the strength and resolution to do it. But there had been many moments of quaking trepidation during the long railroad journey from Tecumseh that day, and she was conscious now, as she looked about her, of a well-nigh complete collapse of courage. The tears would come, and she had more than once furtively to lift her handkerchief to her face.
It was not a face with which one, at first glance, would readily associate tears. The features were regularly, almost firmly cut; and the eyes—large, fine eyes though they were—had commonly a wide awake, steady, practical look, which expressed anything rather than weakness. The effect of the countenance, as a whole, suggested an energetic, self-contained young woman, who knew her way about, who was likely to be neither cheated nor flattered out of her rights, and who distinctly belonged to the managing division of the human race. This conception of her was aided by the erect, independent carriage of her shoulders, which made her seem taller than she really was, and by the clever simplicity of her black tailor-made jacket and dress, and her round, shapely, turban-like hat.
But if one looked closely into this face, here in the snowlight of the November afternoon, there would be found sundry lines and shadows of sensibility and of suffering which were at war with its general expression. And these, when one caught them, had an air of being new, and of not yet having had time to lay definite hold upon the face itself. They were nearer it now, perhaps, as the tears came, than they had often been before, yet even now both they and the moisture glistening on the long lashes, appeared foreign to the calm immobility of the countenance. Tears did not seem to belong there, nor smiles.
Yet a real smile did all at once move to softness the compressed lines of her lips, and bring color to her cheeks and a pleasant mellowing of glance into her eyes. She had been striving to occupy her all-too-introspective mind by reading the signs with which the house-fronts were thickly covered; and here, on a doorway close beside her, was one at sight of which her whole face brightened. And it was a charming face now—a face to remember—with intelligence and fine feeling and frank happiness in every lineament, yet with the same curious suggestion, too, of the smile, like the tears, being rare and unfamiliar.
The sign was a small sheet of tin, painted in yellow letters on a black ground:=
`````REUBEN TRACY,
````Attorney and Counsellor at Law,
`````Second Floor.=
“Oh, he is here, then; he has come back!” she said aloud. She repeated, with an air of enjoying the sound of the words: “He has come back.”
She walked up to the sign, read it over and over again, and even touched it, in a meditative way, with the tip of her gloved finger. The smile came to her face once more as she murmured: “He will know—he will make it easier for me.”