'That is what I have been thinking,' said Mrs Haldane with alacrity; and in the painful moment which intervened while the table was being cleared and the room put in order, she painted to herself a fancy picture of 'the country.' She was a Londoner born, and had but an imperfect idea what the word meant. It was to her a vague vision of greenness, parks and trees and great banks of flowers. The village street was a thing she had no conception of. A pleasant dream of some pleasant room opening on a garden, and level with it, crossed her mind. It was a cottage of romance, one of those cottages which make their appearance in the stories which she half disapproved of, yet felt a guilty pleasure in reading. There had been one, an innocent short one, with the gentlest of good meanings, in the last number of Stephen's magazine, with just such a cottage in it, where a sick heroine recovered. She thought she could see the room, and the invalid chair outside the door, in which he could be wheeled into the garden to the seat under the apple-tree. Her heart overflowed with that pleasant thought. And Stephen might get well! Such a joy was at the end of every vista to Mrs Haldane. She sat and dreamed over this with a smile on her face while the room was being cleared; and her vision was only stayed by the unusual sound of Helen's knock at the door.
'It will be some one to see the house,' said Miss Jane, and she went away hurriedly, with loud-whispered instructions to the girl, into 'the front drawing-room,' to be ready to receive any applicant; so that Miss Jane was not in the room when Helen with her heart beating, and Norah clinging close to her as her shadow, was shown abruptly into the invalid's room. 'The girl' thrust her in without a word of introduction or explanation. Norah was familiar in the place, though her mother was a stranger. Mrs Haldane rose hastily to meet them, and an agitated speech was on Helen's lips that she had come to say good-bye, that she was going away, that they might never meet again in this world,—when her eye caught the helpless figure seated by the window, turning a half-surprised, half-sympathetic look upon her. She had never seen poor Stephen since his illness, and she was not prepared for this complete and lamentable overthrow. It drove her own thoughts, even her own sorrows, out of her mind for the moment. She gave a cry of mingled wonder and horror. She had heard all about it, but seeing is so very different from hearing.
'Oh, Mr Haldane!' she said, going up to him, forgetting herself—with such pity in her voice as he had not heard for years. It drove out of his mind, too, the more recent and still more awful occasion he had to pity her. He looked at her with sudden gratitude in his eyes.
'Yes, it is a change, is it not?' he said with a faint smile. He had been an Alp-climber, a mighty walker, when she saw him last.
Some moments passed before she recovered the shock. She sat down by him trembling, and then she burst into sudden tears—not that she was a woman who cried much in her sorrow, but that her nerves were affected beyond her power of control.
'Mr Haldane, forgive me,' she faltered. 'I have never seen you since—and so much has happened—oh, so much!'
'Ah, yes,' he said. 'I could cry too—not for myself, for that is an old story. I would have gone to you, had I been able—you know that; and it is very, very kind of you to come to me.'
'It is to say good-bye. We are going away to the country, Norah and I,' said Helen; 'there is no longer any place for us here. But I wanted to see you, to tell you—you seem—to belong—so much—to the old time.'
Ah, that old time! the time which softens all hearts. It had not been perfect while it existed, but now how fair it was! Perhaps Stephen Haldane remembered it better than she did; perhaps it might even cross his mind that in that old time she had not cared much to see him, had not welcomed him to her house with any pleasure. But he was too generous to allow himself even to think such a thought, in her moment of downfall. The depths were more bitter to her even than to him. He would not let the least shadow even in his mind fret her in her great trouble. He put out his hand, and grasped hers with a sympathy which was more telling than words.
'And I hope your mother will forgive me too,' she said with some timidity. 'I thought I had more command of myself. We could not go without coming to say good-bye.'