A bunch of crysanthemums stood on the table, asters in vases on dresser and chiffonier—colourful and scentless.
Antonie wore a dress of black lace that had been made by the best dressmaker in the city for this occasion. In festive array she desired to meet her beloved and yet not utterly discard the garb of filial grief. But she had dressed the child in white, with white silk stockings and sky-blue ribands. It was to meet its father like the incarnate spirit of approaching happiness.
From the kitchen came the odours of the choicest autumn dishes—roast duck with apples and a grape-cake, such as she alone knew how to prepare. Two bottles of precious Rhine wine stood in the cool without the window. She did not want to welcome him with champagne. The memories of its subtle prickling, and of much else connected therewith, nauseated her.
If he left his village at six in the morning he must arrive at noon.
And she waited even as she had waited seven years. This morning seven hours had been left, there were scarcely seven minutes now. And then—the door-bell rang.
"That is the new uncle," she said to Amanda who was handling her finery, flattered and astonished, and she wondered to note her brain grow suddenly so cool and clear.
A gentleman entered. A strange gentleman. Wholly strange. Had she met him on the street she would not have known him.
He had grown old—forty, fifty, an hundred years. Yet his real age could not be over twenty-eight! …
He had grown fat. He carried a little paunch about with him, round and comfortable. And the honourable scars gleamed in round red cheeks. His eyes seemed small and receding….
And when he said: "Here I am at last," it was no longer the old voice, clear and a little resonant, which had echoed and re-echoed in her spiritual ear. He gurgled as though he had swallowed dumplings.