The week in Paris passed away quietly, but more pleasantly than she could have believed possible under the circumstances; for nothing could have been kinder or more considerate than the way in which she was treated by her father’s friends, while the brilliant sunshine acted as a tonic to the spirits. Every day they went long drives in the Bois, or took the train to Versailles, and spent long quiet hours in the woods, and Sylvia even found herself able to enjoy a visit to one of the huge Magasins, where Mrs Nisbet invested in quite a collection of presents to send home to English friends. Sylvia was tempted to buy some on her own account, and it was a new and depressing experience to feel that she must not spend an unnecessary penny. Her little hoard was diminishing rapidly, and she was growing more and more anxious to be safest home, and free from at least immediate anxiety.
There was no lady courier to accompany her on this journey, for the days of independence had begun, and she preferred to be alone to wrestle with her forebodings, and try to bring herself into a fitting frame of mind for that trying return to the old scenes.
The parting from the Nisbets was like saying good-bye once more to the dear dad, and she felt hopelessly adrift without their wise and tender counsels, and the feeling of loneliness grew ever deeper and deeper as she approached the English shores.
The great shock through which she had passed had loosened all the ties in life, and made the friends of a few weeks ago seem but the merest of acquaintances. Bridgie had written the sweetest of sympathetic letters, but sorry though she might be, the force of circumstances kept the two girls so far apart, that what had been the saddest time in her friend’s life had seen the climax of her own gaiety. She had been dancing, and singing, and pleasure making while Sylvia shed the bitter tears of bereavement, and in a few weeks more she would be spirited off in Esmeralda’s train to another scene of gaiety. The O’Shaughnessys were by nature so light of heart that they might not care to welcome among them a black-robed figure of grief!
Sylvia felt as though the whole wide world yawned between her and the old interests, and did not yet realise that this feeling of aloofness from the world and its interests is one of the invariable accompaniments of grief. She was young and not given to serious reflection, and she knew only that she was tired and miserable, that the white cliffs about which she had been accustomed to speak with patriotic fervour, looked bleak and cheerless in the light of a wet and chilly evening.
June though it was, she was glad to wrap herself in her cloak, and pull her umbrella over her head as she passed down the gangway on to the stage. In Paris it had been a glorious summer day, and the change to wet and gloom seemed typical of the home-coming before her. The cloaked and mackintoshed figures on the stage seemed all black, all the same. She would not look at them lest their presence should make her realise more keenly her own loneliness; but someone came up beside her as she struggled through the crowd, and forcibly lifted the bag from her hand. She turned in alarm and saw a man’s tall figure, lifted her eyes, and felt her troubles and anxieties drop from her like a cloak.
It was Jack O’Shaughnessy himself!