"Well!" said Eeny, "and where have you been all day, pray?"
"Out riding."
"Where?"
"Oh, everywhere! Don't bother!"
"Do you know we have had luncheon?"
"I don't care—I don't want luncheon."
She ran past her sister, and shut herself up in her room. Eeny stared. In all her experience of her sister she had never known her to be indifferent to eating and drinking. For the first time in Rose's life, love had taken away her appetite.
All that afternoon she stayed shut up in her chamber, dreaming as only eighteen, badly in love, does dream. When darkness fell, and the lamps were lit, and the dinner-bell rang, she descended to the dining-room indifferent for the first time whether she was dressed well or ill.
"What does it matter?" she thought, looking in the glass; "he is not here to see me."
Doctor Frank and the Reverend Augustus Clare dropped in after dinner, but Rose hardly deigned to look at them. She reclined gracefully on a sofa, with half shut eyes, listening to Kate playing one of Beethoven's "Songs without Words," and seeing—not the long, lamp-lit drawing-room with all its elegant luxuries, or the friends around her, but the bare best room of the old yellow farm-house, and the man lying lonely and ill before the blazing fire. Doctor Danton sat down beside her and talked to her; but Rose answered at random, and was so absorbed, and silent, and preoccupied, as to puzzle every one. Her father asked her to sing. Rose begged to be excused—she could not sing to-night. Kate looked at her in wonder.