The door was opened.
"Tell Mr. Prescott that it's Miss Bancroft. Nonsense, I shan't sit down in the drawing-room at all—it makes me feel like a member of the Ladies' Aid come to petition a subscription for a new church carpet or something. Tell Mr. Prescott that I'll be out on the porch."
"Will you come through this way, then, madam?" suggested the old butler, meekly.
Miss Bancroft followed him, sighing a little with relief as the coolness of the great hall, with its smell of old, polished wood and waxed floors, closed about her.
"And, William," she called pathetically after the retreating butler, "do put the kettle on!"
On her way through the house she passed a stately succession of large rooms. A handsome drawing-room, with a polished parquetry floor, fit for the dainty crimson heels of a laced and furbelowed French coquette; its great glass chandelier shrouded in white tarlatan; the dining-room, with high-wainscoted walls, on which hung three or four astonishingly valuable and even beautiful pictures by masters of the eighteenth century English school. For all its impressive grandeur, the long table, covered with a rare piece of Italian brocade, was, with the single carved chair set at the distant end, a barren table, indeed, for a man whom Miss Bancroft knew to be possessed of one of the warmest, tenderest and most affection-craving hearts in the whole world.
"Principles—fiddlesticks!" she observed aloud. "Tst!"
A living-room, in which no one ever lived, a writing-room, in which no one ever wrote, and long halls, wainscoted in dark oak and quiet as those of a college library, whose silence was never broken by the light staccato footsteps of gay feet, or the murmur of roguish voices. But the air of pathos which all these things wore seemed to rise from the fact that they had been planned and secured not for the enjoyment of a lonely old man, but for some happy purpose that had never been realized. They seemed to wear an expression of disappointment, even of apology for existing so uselessly.
"Tut! How can anyone be patient with a man of principles," again commented Miss Bancroft; but her face had grown a little sad.
She was rocking gently back and forth in the shade of the cool stone porch, when the sound of footsteps at last reached her ears, and she looked up with the warm smile of a guest who knows she is always welcome.