Sue Greyson said that Old Place was fairy-land, but in her catalogue of its attractions she had omitted the spacious library; his “den,” Mr. Towne called it. In Tessa’s imagination he was ever in that room buried among its treasures.
Was her photograph in that room? What had he done with it? Where was he keeping it? How he had coaxed for it! She had had it taken unwillingly; it was altogether too much like giving herself away; but when she could refuse no longer she had given it to him. A vignette with all herself in it; too much of herself for him to understand; what would he do with it now? Burn it, perhaps, as she had burned his; but he would not be burning a ghost, it was her own self, that he had thrown away.
“I should have despised myself forever if I had not believed in him and been true,” she reasoned. “I would rather trust in a lie than not believe the truth. And how could I know that he was not true!”
She took up her work and began to sew, her reverie running on and running away with her; an ottoman stood near her, she had laid needlework and scissors upon it: how many associations there were clustering around it! It was an ugly looking thing, too; her mother had worked the cover one winter years ago when she was kept in by a cough; the wreath of roses was so unlike roses, and the parrot that was poised in the centre of the wreath, on a brown twig, was so ungainly! One night—how long ago it was—before she had ever seen Ralph Towne, Felix Harrison had been seated upon it while he told her with such a warm, shy glance that he never slept without praying for her. And Ralph Towne had scattered his photographs over it, and asked her to choose from among them, saying, “I should not have had them taken but for you.”
The ugly old parrot was dear after all.
“I wonder,” she soliloquized, taking slow stitches, “if having lost faith in a person, it can ever be brought back again? If he should come and say that he has been wrong—”
The gate clicked, in an instant she was on her feet, had he come to confess himself in the wrong? Oh, how she would forgive and forget! And trust him?
The tall thin figure had a stoop in its shoulders, Ralph Towne was erect; the overcoat was carelessly worn, revealing a threadbare vest and loose black necktie; it was only Dr. Lake, Dr. Greyson’s new partner.
She had been drawn to him the first moment of their meeting. As soon as he had left after his first call, she had said to Dinah: “I never felt so towards any one before; I shall be so sorry for him to go away where I can not follow him; I want to put my arms around him and coax him to be good.”
“How do you know that he isn’t good?”