After a time of absolute silence, Poppea took up her singing with fresh interest, and Stephen Latimer noticed the increased volume as well as sympathy of her voice. After all, it seemed a pity to put any check upon such a gift, and little by little he began to speak of the desirability of her still further developing it as an art, even as her brother Philip was developing his gift of modelling.
Latimer well knew that Poppea's nature was not one of those who can eke out a life of small things without the force of a mastering love to blend them into dignity, and so he talked of study abroad and travel until Poppea herself began to take up the idea.
Early one evening she had been walking up and down the grassy garden path, watching the poppies fold their petals, palm to palm, for the night, taking the form of pilgrim's cockle-shells, and all at once it came to her that these flowers from the old garden on the hill above had doubtless been planted by her mother long ago, for they were English poppies, delicate of tint, and not the heavy-hued Orientals. How wonderful it was, this handing down. Touching them lightly with her finger-tips as she walked, her heart began to sing back to that long ago, and then the music welled from her lips, all unconscious that she had two auditors; John Angus, sitting above on his piazza, muffled and chilly even in the balmy evening, and a man, who with the air of a stranger, had been walking up and down the road. Finally he opened the gate to the post-office house, but instead of following the sound of the music to its origin, proceeded to the door and knocked.
Presently Oliver Gilbert came stumbling out into the twilight, and, cane in hand, made his halting way into the garden.
"Poppy," he said, "there is some one who wants to see you; it's that Mr. Winslow who came down last summer, the day after the Felton ladies had the party. Do you remember?"
"Yes, Daddy," said Poppea, "I remember,"—the words feeling cold to her lips like drops of dew.
"Will you come indoors? or shall I tell him you are here?"
"I will come in," she said, rising quickly from the bench on which she had been seated for a moment. No, she did not want him to come there, for beside her in the twilight seemed to be sitting the ghost of Hugh.
Yet slow as Gilbert was, he gained the house before her, and when she reached the porch, it was Bradish Winslow alone who stood in the open doorway, both hands extended.
"I have been abroad; I did not know until yesterday," he said at once without other greeting—as if she must have wondered at his silence. "And now the thing of which you made a barrier has vanished, how can you keep me out, how can you hold me away even if you want to, little one? But you don't, you can't; ah, child, child, do you know how I have missed you? How I had to put the ocean between in order to obey the plea in your letter?"