"Will you tie me a nice wreath, Poppy, like the one we always have to hang up there at Christmas, lacking of course the berries? I guess I'll go in and change and get a bite to eat, if you'll spell me here for twenty minutes longer," and Poppea, with a comprehending smile and nod, buried her face in the fresh, spicy greenery.
What Gilbert wanted with the wreath or did with it when he took it from her hands presently, she did not know, for later, as she walked up and down the flagged walk between the porch and gate, thinking of the details of to-morrow, the latch clicked and Hugh Oldys came through the wicket.
It was not alone the colorless twilight that made the change in his face which struck her like a blow. Without having become absolutely thin, the man of a year before, with height and breadth, good color, wholesome flesh, natural joy and interest in life and living, seemed to have passed through some phase that, while it spiritualized in a sense, had eliminated much that was characteristic.
"Your mother—is she worse?" was Poppea's first question.
"I do not think so, though in a case like hers it is worse to be no better. I should have been to see you many days ago but for a sudden change in nurses. No one stays more than a month," he added, breaking through his habitual reticence on this subject, as though at last he must have the support of sympathy.
"No one but you, Hugh. Ah, how can you go on so when every one else falters?"
"Because she is my mother and not theirs; in that lies all."
"All?" Poppea echoed, leaning toward him with such unmistakable tenderness in her eyes that it must have broken through any self-raised barrier of the man's had he but seen and compassed it. Yet he never looked at her directly nor let her read his face, though it was not until after he had gone that Poppea realized this.
For an hour the conversation drifted to casual things, and save for Philip, his work and plans, in wholly impersonal channels, they two sitting on the top step of the porch. When at last Hugh rose to go, and walking slowly side by side down the narrow path they halted at the end, one inside the gate, one without, he said, looking backward up the way they had come, as if into the past:—
"It will be good when you come back, but it isn't to be supposed or hoped that after you have made the break you will care for this sleepy little village as you have, Poppea. I have always wondered why you cared so little for the New York life with the fine opening you made. In the few months I had there, the fulness and the vigor of it all gripped me so that leaving was a wrench."