She came to me with her hand stretched out. I made the bow that had been waiting for so long and at the first word from her clear voice I felt as if we were friends.
We had tea before we went away, in Mistress Dorothy's parlour, which looked out upon the Minster, and was so near to it that when the bells chimed the quarters it sounded as if they were ringing in the room itself. It was because this was a town, I supposed, that there was no sunshine, and everything in the room looked brown or drab or dark grey.
Mistress Dorothy looked very happy, notwithstanding, and not at all as if she thought the room dull. She took me to the window, where her chair and the table with her work-basket stood, and showed me how she could see through one of the side windows of the Minster, to where another great painted window facing the west was blazing in the sunset.
'Is it not beautiful?' she said.
There was a shimmer of gold, and red and blue, but so far off.
I wished she could have seen Farmer Foster's field of sainfoin as it was just now, a glittering rose-coloured sea, that looked in the evening light as if some of the sunset clouds had floated down to earth.
Mrs. Dorothy could not even see the sunset; the Minster towered between her and the red-gold west. Poor little Mistress Dorothy! and yet she looked so happy, so cordial and contented.
By-and-by she began to ask me questions about home. The Professor had gone back to his study, and Master Caleb stood in the window opposite her chair.
'Have you got a father and mother?'
'No; he has lost his mother,' Master Caleb answered for me; and then rather abruptly he began to tell her about my mother's life and death. He told it in beautiful words, that made me listen as if it were a story about some one I had never known.