Nothing was changed. There stood the shepherdess ogling the shepherd; there hung Mr Bowater; there dangled the chandelier; there angled the same half-dozen flies. Not a leg, caster, or antimacassar was out of place. Yet how steadfastly I had to keep my back turned on my landlady lest she should witness my discomfiture. Faded, dingy, crowded, shrunken—it seemed unbelievable, as I glanced around me, that here I could have lived and breathed so many months, and been so ridiculously miserable, so tragically happy. All that bygone happiness and wretchedness seemed, for the moment, mere waste and folly. And not only that—"common." I climbed Mr Bates's clumsy staircase, put down my dressing-case, and slowly removing my gloves, faced dimly the curtained window. Beyond it lay the distant hills, misty in the morning sunbeams, the familiar meadows all but chin-high with buttercups.
"Oh, Mrs Bowater," I turned at last, "here I am. You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?"
"There comes a time, miss, when we don't change; only the outer walls crumble away morsel by morsel, so to speak. But that's not for you yet. Still, that's the reason. Me and the old sticks are just what we were, at least to the eye; and you—well, there!—the house has been like a cage with the bird gone."
She stood looking at me with one long finger stretching bonily out on the black and crimson tablecloth, a shining sea of loving kindness in her eyes. "I can see they have taken good care of you and all, preened the pretty feathers. Why, you are a bit plumper in figure, miss; only the voice a little different, perhaps." The last words were uttered almost beneath her breath.
"My voice, Mrs Bowater; oh, they cannot have altered that."
"Indeed they have, miss; neater-twisted, as you might say; but not scarcely to be noticed by any but a very old friend. Maybe you are a little tired with your long drive and those two solemnities on the box. I remember the same thing—the change of voice—when Fanny came back from her first term at Miss Stebbings'."
"How is she?" I inquired in even tones. "She has never written to me. Not a word."
But, strange to say, as Mrs Bowater explained, and not without a symptom of triumph, that's just what Fanny had done. Her letter was awaiting me on the mantelpiece, tucked in behind a plush-framed photograph.
"Now, let me see," she went on, "there's hot water in your basin, miss—I heard the carriage on the hill; a pair of slippers to ease your feet, in case in the hurry of packing they'd been forgot; and your strawberries and cream are out there icing themselves on the tray. So we shan't be no time, though disturbing news has come from Mr Bowater, his leg not mending as it might have been foreseen—but that can wait."