Rose remembered the first day he came to the house, a rather sombre, rather picturesque figure, with his dark eyes and graceful, lithe body. Things moved very quickly after that first evening, so quickly that in retrospect there seemed to Mrs. Summers to have been scarcely a moment of ordinary acquaintanceship. There was a slight interval devoted to impetuous, ardent love-making, and then the wedding, for which she, herself a year-old bride, had not been able to stay.
Her husband’s regiment had been ordered to India a week before Cecily Merivale became Cecily Kingslake, and she had sailed with him. A breath of warm air swept towards the open door, and fanned the short curtains at the window; it brought with it the scent of carnations, and to Mrs. Summers a sudden vision of Cecily as she had last seen her.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her room at Carmarthen Terrace. The room was flooded with sunshine. The basin on the washstand was, Mrs. Summers remembered, full of carnations, and as she entered the room she had exclaimed at their beauty.
“They’ve just come. I’m going to arrange them,” Cecily had said. She held a letter which had also evidently just come, and as she raised her head the look on her face had startled her cousin. She remembered fearing for her. Could any human being with impunity be as ecstatically happy as that? It was like tempting Providence.
Something of this, half in jest, half seriously, she had tried to say, and Cecily had laughed, the low, trembling laugh of a delight too deep to find other expression. She had given herself over to her love as the woman a little difficult, more than a little fastidious, always gives herself—with a surrender complete and unquestioning.
The sunny bedroom, the dainty new frocks over the backs of the chairs, the litter of boxes and paper about the room, the brilliant flowers, and Cecily in her white petticoat, her white shoulders bare;—beautiful, proud, and smiling,—Mrs. Summers saw her as though five days rather than five years had passed since they had met.
She moved, and glanced back over her shoulder. The memory was so vivid that it stirred her to impatience. Why didn’t Cecily come? A door closed sharply.
“Where? Where is she?” It was the same clear, eager voice, and Mrs. Summers smiled, suddenly reassured.
The next moment Cecily’s arms were round her, and there was a rush of incoherent questions. Then Rose gently pushed her back, and they looked at one another.
Involuntarily an exclamation rose to the elder woman’s lips, mercifully checked, as she recognized, by Cecily’s eager words.