“I like London,” Florence answered; “still it does now and then feel like a prison.”
“And the rows and rows of houses are the prison bars, my love. May we enter the cottage?” she asked suddenly. She was evidently tired; she stooped, and looked older and more worn than usual.
“Poor old dear,” Florence thought. “I hope she is not worrying about Madame Celestine’s bill, and that she will soon hear from Sir William Rammage. Then she will be happier.”
It was a little house, simple inside as well as out, with tiny rooms, plainly furnished. The dining-room had been newly done up, with cretonne curtains and a dado, and a buttery-hatch in which Florence took a certain pride as something rather grand for so small a place. The drawing-room was old-fashioned; a stiff roomy sofa with hard flat cushions at one end; at the other a sweet jangling piano. There were corner cupboards with china bowls of pot-pourri on them; on either side of the fireplace a gaunt, high-backed easy-chair, and on the left of each chair an old-fashioned screen on which was worked a peacock. Aunt Anne stopped on the threshold.
It seemed to Florence as if the room recognized the old lady, as if it had been waiting, knowing that she would come. There was something about it that said more plainly than any words could have said that the hands were still that had first arranged it, and many footsteps had gone out from its doorway that would never come in at it more.
“It always depresses me,” Florence explained; “but it is just as we found it. We refurnished the dining-room, and sit there a good deal. It is more cheerful than this. Come upstairs”—and she led the way.
The bedrooms were all small too, save one in front, that seemed to match the drawing-room. It looked like a room to die in: Florence thought so, as she entered it for the first time with Aunt Anne. A quaint four-post bedstead with dark chintz curtains, a worm-eaten bureau, a sampler worked in Berlin wool and framed in black cherry-wood hanging over the fireplace.
“This is the best room,” she said, “and we keep it for visitors. There is a little one, meant to be a dressing-room, I suppose, leading out of it,” and she went to a bright little nook with a bed in it. “I always feel that the best bedroom and the drawing-room belong to a past world, and the rest of the house to the present one.”
“It is like your life and mine, my darling; mine to the past and yours to the present.”
“I think you ought to sleep in the best room, Aunt Anne.”