So this was Polly.
It was only a shabby studio, where poverty and art fought a hand-to-hand struggle for the bare maintenance, but among the after scenes of her busy life Mildred never forgot the place where she first saw Dr. Heriot's ward; it lingered in her memory, a fair, haunting picture as of something indescribably sweet and sad.
Its few accessories were so suggestive of a truer taste made impossible by paucity of success; an unfinished painting all dim grays and pallid, watery blues; a Cain fleeing out of a blurred outline of clouds; fragmentary snatches of colour warming up pitiless details; rickety chairs and a broken-down table; a breadth of faded tapestry; a jar of jonquils, the form pure Tuscan, the material rough earthenware, a plaster Venus, mutilated but grand, shining out from the dull red background of a torn curtain. A great unfurnished room, full of yellow light and warm sunshine, and, standing motionless in a ladder of motes and beams, with brown eyes drinking in the twinkling glory like a young eagle, was a girl in a shabby black dress, with thin girlish arms clasped across her breast. For a moment Dr. Heriot paused, and he and Mildred exchanged glances; the young figure in its forlornness came to them like a mournful revelation; the immobility was superb, the youthful languor pitiful. As Dr. Heriot touched her, she turned on them eyes full of some lost dream, and a large tear that had been gathering unconsciously brimmed over and splashed down on his hand.
'My child, have we startled you? Mr. Fabian told us to come up.' For a moment she looked bewildered. Her thoughts had evidently travelled a long way, but with consciousness came a look of relief and pleasure.
'Oh, I knew you would come—papa told me so. Oh, why have you been so long?—it is three months almost since papa died. Oh, poor papa! poor papa!' and the flush of joy died out of her face as, clasping her small nervous hands round Dr. Heriot's arm, she laid her face down on them and burst into a passion of tears.
'I sent for you directly I heard; they kept me in ignorance—have they not told you so? Poor child, how unkind you must have thought me!' and a grieved look came over Dr. Heriot's face as he gently stroked the closely-cropped head, that felt like the dark, soft plumage of some bird.
'No, I never thought you that,' she sobbed. 'I was only so lonely and tired of waiting; and then I got ill, and Mr. Fabian was good to me, and so were the others. But papa had left me to you, and I wanted you to fetch me. You have come to take me home, have you not?'
She looked up in his face pleadingly as she said this; she spoke in a voice sweet, but slightly foreign, but with a certain high-bred accent, and there was something unique in her whole appearance that struck her guardian with surprise. The figure was slight and undeveloped, with the irregularity of fourteen; but the ordinary awkwardness of girlhood was replaced by dignity, almost grace, of movement. She was dark-complexioned, but her face was a perfect oval, and the slight down on the upper lip gave a characteristic but not unpleasing expression to the mouth, which was firm but flexible; the hair had evidently been cut off in recent illness, for it was tucked smoothly behind the ears, and was perfectly short behind, which would have given her a boyish look but for the extreme delicacy of the whole contour.
'You have come to take me home, have you not?' she repeated anxiously.
'This lady has,' he replied, with a look at Mildred, who had stood modestly in the background. 'I wish I had a home to offer you, my dear; but my wife is dead, and——'