"Hers to keep ..." replied the goddess, smiling.
But her speech stopped there, shorn of a donator's gracious frills, and the smile became somewhat fixed upon the lovely lip....
There had appeared a man's face at the glass of the old doors, and the lady, straightening benignantly to sweep on to her triumph upstairs, had run suddenly upon his fixed gaze. Nothing, of course, could have been more natural than this man's appearance there: who upon earth more suitable for door-keeper to the distinguished visitors than he, who had given his office to the Settlement to-day, in lieu of more expensive gifts? Yet by some flashing trick of Carlisle's imagination, or of his air of immobility, seen darkly through the glass, it was almost as if he might have, been waiting there for her alone....
But the meeting of eyes was over as soon as it began. With so prompt a courtesy did the Dabney House physician swing open the door that it was as if he had been opening it all along, as if she hadn't caught him looking at her....
"How do you do, Miss Heth?... Such a dreadful day!--you were brave to venture out."
"How d'you do?" said Carlisle, in the voice of "manner," a rising voice, modulated, distant and superior. And over her shoulder, she addressed the little Jew girls, with an air of more than perfect ease:
"Well, then, good-bye! Be sure to catch her the new one to-morrow...."
She had seen that the strange young man was smiling. And by that she knew that he remembered their last meeting, and wanted to trade upon her queer weakness at that time, pretending that he and she were pleasant acquaintances together. Presently she should inform him better as to that. But why, oh, why, that small flinching at the sight of him, the very man she had fared into the downpour to explode, not pausing even to mourn her lover's going?...
"I'm a search-party of one," said Dr. Vivian, throwing wider the door, "for Mr. Pond. I wondered if he could have got lost, somewhere down here--he's never turned up yet."
"Mr. Pond?"