And she laughs again, a pleasant, cheery laugh, not with any insincere modulation or false ring like the laugh of Society. But with all her vulgarities and eccentricities, Mrs. Bradshaw B. Woollffe is a genuine woman.
She pours herself out another cup of tea, and looks complacently round her pretty room; and as she looks, there comes the sound of a step on the stairs, and the door is thrown open, and a tall figure comes straight to her amidst the obscurity, and she springs up to welcome him with a cordiality so genuine that Society would doubtless call it vulgar.
"Keith, my dear boy—so you've come. I'm real glad to see you, that I am."
Her visitor takes the two hands she extends him, and returns their warm pressure. Then she forces him into a chair by the fire, and stirs the logs into a blaze, and brings him some tea, and fusses about him in a pleasant, genial, womanly fashion that is all her own.
Keith Athelstone accepts her attentions with laughing opposition against the amount of trouble she is taking; but on the whole he likes it, and he likes her too, for she has been a kind friend to him in days gone by, when he was only poor and struggling—a stranger in a strange land, not yet having "struck ile" in the way of fortune and success.
"And so you have really left Rome?" says Mrs. Bradshaw B. Woollffe at last, when her guest is reclining lazily in his chair, and has begged her not to ring for lights or disturb the cosy solitude of the room. "And how are the Vavasours?"
A little change is visible in the face of the young man—a face strangely altered in these two years. The features are handsome as ever, but there is a haggard, worn look about them, and the blue eyes are feverish and dim, and heavy shadows lie beneath the long dark lashes.
Those eyes and lashes are the greatest beauty in Keith Athelstone's face, and now that haunting look of sadness gives them tenfold more attraction than they possessed before. "They are quite well," he says, after a brief pause; "they come to town next week."
"I wonder you did not wait and come with them."
"Lady Vavasour did not wish it," he answers quietly.