CHAPTER XXVI.
The spring opened from day to day, and the apple blossoms were bursting. Mr. Linden might soon be looked for, and one warm May afternoon Faith went in to make his room ready. It was the first day she had been fit for it, and she was yet so little strong that she must take care of her movements. With slow and unable fingers she did her pleasant work, and then very tired, sat down in her old reading window-seat and went into a long dream-meditation. It was pleasant for a while, in harmony with the summer air and the robins in the maple; it got round at last into the train of the last weeks. A fruitless reverie ended in Faith's getting very weary; and she went back to her own room to put herself on the couch cushions and go to sleep.
Sleep held on its way after a peaceful fashion, yet not so but that Faith's face shewed traces of her thoughts. Mrs. Derrick came softly and watched her, and the spring air blew back the curtains and fanned her, and brushed her hair with its perfumed wings; and one or two honey bees buzzed in and sought honey from the doctor's flowers, and forsook them again for the fields.
Up there at last, following Mrs. Derrick, came Mr. Linden. With few reasons asked or told of his sudden appearance; with little said even of Faith's illness but the mere fact, he went up to the sunlit room and there staid. Not restingly in Faith's easy-chair, but standing by the low fire-place, just where he could have the fullest view of her. Mrs. Derrick came and went,—he never stirred. The sunbeams came and went—wrapped Faith in their bright folds and lay at his feet, then began to withdraw altogether. They had shewed him the unwontedly pale and worn face, and lit up the weary lines in which the lips lay asleep; and just when the sunbeams had left it all, Mr. Linden became aware that two dark eyes had softly opened and were gazing at him as if he were a figure in a dream. So perhaps for a minute he seemed, touched with the light as he was, which made a glorification in the brown locks of his hair and gleamed about "pleasant outlines" standing as fixed and still as a statue. But they were not statue eyes which looked into hers, and Faith's dreamlike gaze was only for a moment. Then every line of her face changed with joy—and she sprang up to hide it in Mr. Linden's arms. He stood still, holding her as one holds some rescued thing. For Faith was too weak to be just herself, and weariness and gladness had found their own very unusual expression in an outflow of nervous tears.
Something seemed to have taken away Mr. Linden's power of words. He did place her among the cushions again, but if every one of her tears had been balm to him he could not have let them flow more unchecked. Perhaps the recollection that they were tears came suddenly; for with very sudden sweet peremptoriness he said,
"Faith, hush!—Are you so glad to see me?"
She was instantly still. No answer.
"What then?" The intonation was most tender,—so, rather than by any playfulness, cancelling his own question. She raised her head, she had dismissed her tears, yet the smile with which her glance favoured him was a sort of rainbow smile, born of clouds.
"That is a very struggling and misty sunbeam!" said Mr. Linden. "Is that why I was kept out of its range so long?"
Faith's head drooped. Her forehead lay lightly against him; he could not see what sort of a smile she wore.