She was silent. Her white face drooped and bowed itself, while her tired fingers relaxed their hold on her skirt which trailed in the dust of the road. Her profile, as Nance glanced sideways at it, had a look of hopeless and helpless passivity.
The girl withdrew into herself, irritated and yet remorseful. She felt an obscure longing to be of some service to this unhappy one; yet as she watched her, thus bowed and impenetrable, she felt shut out and excluded.
Before they reached the centre of the village—for Nance felt unwilling to leave Mrs. Renshaw until she had seen her safe within her park gates—they suddenly came upon Baltazar Stork returning from his daily excursion to Mundham.
He was as elegantly dressed as usual and in one hand carried a little black bag, in the other a bunch of peonies. Nance, to her surprise, caught upon her companion’s face a look of extraordinary illumination as the man advanced towards them. In recalling the look afterwards, she found herself thinking of the word “vivacity” in regard to it.
“Oh, I’m always the same,” Mr. Stork replied to the elder lady’s greeting. “I grow more annoyingly the same every day. I say the same things, think the same thoughts and meet the same people. It’s—lovely!”
“I’m glad you ended like that,” observed Nance, laughing. It was one of her peculiarities to laugh—a little foolishly—when she was embarrassed and though she had encountered Sorio’s friend once or twice before, she felt for some reason or other ill at ease with him.
With exquisite deliberation Mr. Stork placed the black bag upon the ground and selecting two of the freshest blooms from his gorgeous bunch, handed one by the light of a little shop window to each of the women.
“How is your friend?” enquired Mrs. Renshaw with a touch of irony in her tone. “This young lady has not seen him to-day.”
At that moment Nance realized that she hated this melancholy being whom a chance encounter with her husband’s son seemed to throw into such malicious spirits. She felt that everything Mrs. Renshaw was destined to say from now till they separated, would be designed to humiliate and annoy her. This may have been a fantastic illusion, but she acted upon it with resolute abruptness.
“Good-bye,” she exclaimed, turning to her companion, “I’ll leave you in Mr. Stork’s care. I promised Rachel not to be late to-night. Good-bye—and thank you,” she bowed to the young man and held up the peony, “for this.”