The two years of absence were to begin in April. It was in February that Robert Ferguson was told definitely just when his tenant would terminate her lease; he received the news in absolute silence. Mrs. Richie's note came at breakfast; he read it, then went into his library and shut the door. He sat down at his writing-table, his hands in his pockets, an unlighted cigar between his teeth. He sat there nearly an hour. Then, throwing the cigar into his waste-basket, he knocked his glasses off with a bewildered gesture; "Well, I'll be hanged," he said, softly. It was at that moment that he forgave Mrs. Maitland her outrageous joke of more than a year before. "I've always known that woman was no fool," he said, smiling ruefully at the remembrance of his anger at Sarah Maitland's advice. "It was darned good advice!" he said; but he looked positively dazed. "And I've always said I wouldn't give Life the chance to play another trick on me!" he reflected; "well, I won't. This is no silly love-affair; it's good common sense." Ten minutes later, as he started for his office, he caught sight of his face in the mirror in the hall. He had lifted one hand to take his hat from the rack, but as he suddenly saw himself, he stood stock-still, with upraised arm and extended fingers; Robert Ferguson had probably not been really aware of his reflection in a looking-glass for twenty-five years. He saw now a lean, lined, sad face, a morose droop of thin and bitter lips; he saw gray hair standing up stiffly above a careworn forehead; he saw kind, troubled eyes. And as he looked, he frowned. "I'm an ugly cuss," he said to himself, sighing; "and I look sixty." In point of fact, he was nearly fifty. "But so is she," he added, defiantly, and took down his hat. "Only, she looks forty." And then he thought of Mrs. Maitland's "fair and fifty," and smiled, in spite of himself. "Yes, she is rather good-looking," he admitted.
And indeed she was; Mrs. Richie's quiet life with her son had kept her forehead smooth, and her eyes—eyes the color of a brook which loiters in shady places over last year's leaves—softly clear. There was a gentle placidity about her; the curious, shy hesitation, the deep, half-frightened sadness, which had been so marked when her landlord knew her first, had disappeared; sometimes she even showed soft gaieties of manner or speech which delighted her moody neighbor to the point of making him laugh. And laughing had all the charm of novelty to poor Robert Ferguson. "I never dreamed of her going away," he said to himself. Well, yes; certainly Mrs. Maitland had some sense, after all. When, a week later, blundering and abrupt, he referred to Mrs. Maitland's "sense," Mrs. Richie could not at first understand what he was talking about. "She 'knew more than you gave her credit for'? I thought you gave her credit for knowing everything! Oh, you don't want me to leave Mercer? I don't see the connection. I don't know everything! But you are very flattering, I'm sure. I am a 'good tenant,' I suppose?"
"Please don't go." She laughed at what she thought was his idea of a joke; then said, with half a sigh, that she did not know any one in Philadelphia; "when David isn't at home I shall be pretty lonely," she said.
"Please don't go," he said again, in a low voice. They were sitting before the fire in Mrs. Richie's parlor; the glass doors of the plant-room were open,—that plant-room, which had been his first concession to her; and the warm air of the parlor was fragrant with blossoming hyacinths. There was a little table between them, with a bowl of violets on it, and a big lamp. Robert Ferguson rose, and stood with his hands behind him, looking down at her. His hair, in a stiff brush above his forehead, was quite gray, but his face in its unwonted emotion seemed quivering with youth. He knocked off his glasses irritably. "I never know how to say things," he said, in a low voice; "but—please don't go."
Mrs. Richie stared at him in amazement.
"I think we'd better get married," he said.
"Mr. Ferguson!"
"I think I've cared about you ever since you came here, but I am such a fool I didn't know it until Mrs. Maitland said that absurd thing last fall."
"I—I don't know what you mean!" she parried, breathlessly; "at any rate, please don't say anything more about it."
"I have to say something more." He sat down again with the air of one preparing for a siege. "I've got several things to say. First, I want to find out my chances?"