Not a word was spoken about Robert’s faithlessness; only when they met that morning, madam had taken Dora tenderly in her arms, kissed her, and murmured some loving and soothing words of fondness, and calling her by all the pet names she had at her command. But Dora gently withdrew from her aunt’s fond embrace, with a low, “Please don’t, auntie!” while her face grew a shade paler, and she caught her breath convulsively.
So the subject was dropped, for madam knew she could bear it better if let alone, and so she said no more, and Dora subsided into her icy calmness again.
All through that day her aunt kept regarding her with wonder, for Dora had always been a creature of impulse, and now she was like a block of marble, so hard and cold; and she more than once found herself repeating these words of Thomas Hood:
“Fair is she as the dreams young poets weave—
Bright eyes, and dainty lips, and tresses curly—
In outward loveliness a child of Eve,
But cold as nymph of Lurley!”
A slight commotion in the hall attracted their attention, toward the middle of the forenoon.
There were steps going back and forth, and anxious, troubled whispers; then the voices grew to muttering, and then louder, till the ladies sitting so quietly in their room could hear quite plainly what was said, and Dora instantly recognized the voice of Mr. Ellerton; the other one she did not know.
“It is the strangest thing,” she heard Robert’s father say, “I ever knew the boy to do! It doesn’t seem like Robert at all! He never was a coward about anything when he was at home, and I can’t understand his showing the white feather now. Besides, the letter doesn’t read like him; it is too precise and constrained.”