“It’s exactly suited to the place; it epitomizes its spirit,” said Anna, glibly. “It’s austere without being forbidding—perfect Colonial adaptation of the Greek.”
Millicent made no architectural observation. Instead she said: “If you don’t mind, I should like to go in for a while. You could pick me up later, perhaps on your way back to—Where is it we are lunching?”
Consternation looked out of Anna’s eyes, bewilderment out of Brockton’s. But Millicent turned to them with such gentle command in her gaze that they could offer no protest.
“Come back in half an hour, if you are ready,” she said. Upon Anna, whose baffled look followed her up the flagging between the close-clipt lawns, there came the feeling that she was leaving her cousin alone with the beloved dead.
“Now what—” began Brockton, in full-toned protest,—“what the—”
“That was the last thing Will Hayter did,”—Anna interrupted his question. “And the first, so to speak. It was a fairly important commission. Jessup, the Trya Drop liniment man, came from Riverfield—he has a mammoth place outside now. When he began to coin money faster than the mint, he gave lots of things to his birthplace—which has always blushed for him. It’s prouder that Whittier once spent Sunday with one of its citizens than that Alonzo Jessup is its son. Well, he gave the library and museum, and the commission went to Will Hayter. The Hayters came from here two or three generations ago. It was just before his death, and Millicent has been abroad almost ever since. So she had never seen it.”
Brockton gave a look of speechless chagrin at his hostess, which she answered haughtily:
“My dear Mr. Brockton, after all, I never undertook to be a marriage-broker!” Then she glanced at the chauffeur and forbore.
Meantime Millicent sat in one of the square exhibition-halls. The sweet air, with the scent of hay from the farther country faintly impregnating it, blew through the quiet. No one else shared the room with her. The even light soothed her eyes, the stillness calmed the fluttering apprehension in her breast which had presaged she knew not what fresh anguish of loss. There were pictures on the walls—one or two not despicable originals which Trya Drop Jessup had given, many copies, and a few specimens of Riverfield’s native talent. But she saw none of them, any more than one sees the windows and the paintings in a great cathedral in the first fulness of reverence. To her this was a sacred place. That grief had lost its poignancy, that youth and health with cruel insistence had reasserted their sway over her life, did not mean forgetfulness, unfaith.
“Truly, truly,”—she almost breathed the words aloud,—“there has been no other one. That was my love, young as we were. But I must fill up the days—I must fill up the days.”