Poppea came forward and, refraining from putting her hand upon his shoulder in the old way that marked his boyishness, greeted him as she would any other young fellow of nineteen, drawing him into a little group back of the long piano where he saw Miss Emmy and half a dozen of the Quality Hill colony. At the same time, he was conscious that her eyes were looking over his head in a rapid search for something or some one that she did not see, which reminded him of the message.
"Hugh Oldys has been here," he said, "and was very sorry that he could not wait to see you."
"Then he has gone? Why could he not wait?"
Philip, who read Poppea's moods with mercurial swiftness, was tempted to add some words of explanation, but Winslow, hearing Poppea's question, intervened, saying, to her ear alone:—
"Now you have earned a rest in cooler air where you can enjoy the reflection of the pleasure you have given. Miss Emmy has a surprise for you; Capoul, the most expressive emotional tenor of a decade, is coming in from the opera where he is singing Wilhelm Meister in Mignon. You have never heard it? Ah, there is so much music that I wish to hear again for the first time through watching you hear it."
The next morning Poppea slept late, owing to the fact that Nora had slipped in and closed the shutters fast. She had intended taking the early train for home, as three days would elapse before she was to sing at an afternoon concert given for the benefit of a fashionable charity.
When Nora finally judged that it was proper for the household protégée, in whom she took no small pride, to awake, and brought her coffee and rolls to her room, after the Feltons' winter custom, Poppea found herself undergoing a sort of nervous reaction caused by the excitement of the night before and the lack of air in the shuttered room. Twelve o'clock was the next train possible, and entering the library to make positive her going, she found Stephen Latimer standing before the fire, while the ladies and Mr. Esterbrook sat opposite him in benumbed silence, Miss Emmy having her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.
Miss Felton motioned Poppea to the lounge beside her: "Mr. Latimer has brought us dreadful news! Please tell her, Stephen."
For a moment Poppea thought that she would suffocate; suppose that Daddy was dead and she away! Then she found herself listening as through rushing water to the story of how Mr. Oldys, when superintending the placing of a heavy piece of the new machinery, had been instantly killed by its fall.
The mill hands, becoming demoralized in their wild rush to get a physician, had broken the news abruptly to Madam Oldys, which at first she did not believe. But later, when they brought her husband home and Dr. Morewood was sitting by watching for a heart collapse, her mind, not her body, had suddenly given way—not weakly or plaintively, but violently, in a manner that no one who had witnessed her frailty would have deemed possible, so that restraint was imperative.