In this particular season they were all that could be desired, and our lovers—for lovers they were, though no explicit word of love had ever passed between them—enjoyed their glory to their heart’s content. Eleanor was satisfied that Michael did not speak to her; the spell of the present time was so delicious that she would not have had it broken. She had forgotten outside troubles and difficulties; she only felt that all was well, and that a happiness awaited her in the future, so great that she could well afford to wait for it.
September sighed itself out in golden glory, leaving a luxury of ripening tints on every tree, filling the tangled hedges with many-coloured flames of dying weeds; for, as every one knows who lives in the country, the smaller plants that grow in the ditches and near to the ground—the wild geranium, the smaller hemlock, or that plant which is akin to it, the rose-bushes, the hawthorn, and wild guelder rose—these are the things that ‘turn’ first, these the objects on which autumn first places her crimson finger; and then, when she has embellished the hedges, and is pleased with the result of her handiwork, she becomes bolder, mounts higher, attacks the trees—the oak and the beech first, the sycamore and the ash following in their turn. Then it is that the river gains his stronger voice, and rushes along, ever more tumultuously. Then it is that o’ nights the air is keen, and that at that hour which has said good-bye to afternoon, and is not yet evening, there is a strange, metallic, lambent light in the sky, a light which seems also almost to crackle and sparkle in the very atmosphere, a magic, unearthly light, which has its charms for those who love to study nature in her more obscure phases.
It was on a glorious, crisp afternoon, a little beyond the middle of October, that Eleanor returned to the Dower House, after driving about a bevy of little Johnsons the whole afternoon. She dressed herself then, and went to dine and spend the evening at the old doctor’s house. After dinner Michael came in. He seemed lately to have enjoyed an unusual quantity of leisure in the evening hours. The talk turned to books; amongst other books to a book of poetry, some passage in which was disputed. Eleanor said that she had the book, and would go across to her house and fetch it. Upon this Michael announced that he should convey her across the square, and had gone as far as the door of the doctor’s house with her, when his old friend, who was in his library, called to him, hearing his step.
‘Go to him,’ said Eleanor. ‘I will fetch the book, and return to you.’ And she walked quickly across the square to her own door.
Arrived there, she found a woman’s figure standing, in an uncertain attitude, near it. Something—a nameless chill, an unspeakable dread, took possession of her. She did not speak, but paused, looking at the figure, her mind disturbed with vague recollections of Otho’s last visit.
‘Miss Askam!’ said the loiterer, in an uncertain voice.
‘Yes; who is it?’
‘It is I—Ada. I wanted to speak to you.’
‘Come in with me, then,’ she replied, but felt all the time that she was inviting some great terror and woe to enter her house.
She opened the door, and led Ada into the drawing-room, turned up the light, and looked at her; and as she looked, the words were frozen upon her lips at the aspect of the figure before her. Had not the voice said, ‘It is I—Ada,’ she would scarcely have recognised this countenance. Ada wore a large, thick, woollen shawl, falling loosely about her; and a small hat, from under which showed a face which had aged by twenty years, and which was not only aged, but seamed, furrowed, worn with lines of what must have been mortal anguish, seeing that every one of them had been stamped in less than five short months. The pretty, delicate, meaningless face was clean gone: in its stead there was a mask, betraying a mind devoured by misery; eyes which looked at once hard and frightened, hunted and yet defiant—the eyes of an animal at bay; a countenance to fill the most indifferent beholder with horror.