Her hand fell back from the lapel of his coat. Tears of vexation and fatigue sprang to her eyes.
“Hush! She’s there, in the dining room—she’ll hear you. I’m not crazy, I’m sick of living like a tenement house.”
The master was prevented from saying anything further by the entrance of a pert-faced girl in cap and apron, who said briskly:
“Dinner’s served.”
Standing there in Eliza’s place between the cheap portières, she represented a convulsion in the clerk’s household. He had never been thus invited to a meal in his own house before. He got off his coat and followed his wife in to dinner.
The little, cozy room possessed for the first time an element of unrest. In eight years it had not altered so much as this. At first Gertrude, with a washerwoman, did her own work; then Eliza came blithely and good-humoredly on the scene. She had grown to be like a friend. Warrener liked her. In her oven, which she had at length triumphantly overcome, she baked him certain favorite little breads much to his taste. She ironed his collars and shirts “just right.” He could say to her:
“Look here, Eliza, just run down to Pearce’s and get me a couple of cigars.” He could never order this bustling individual in cap and gown in this manner. “A tenement!” The word touched his contented pride in his little household; already the golden sunlight was beginning to slip from the wall. Change and progression were following the tired man close on his heels to his very door.
A fortnight went by after her call at the house on the hill before the event reverently hoped for by George Warrener’s wife transpired.
Mrs. Bellamy in her French automobile drove up Grand Street and called on Mrs. Warrener.
Gertrude was out, and when she came home and found the bit of pasteboard lying on the hatstand and realized that Mrs. Bellamy had been—and had gone!—a feeling of desolation swept over her such as might attack a lonely occupant of a desert island on rushing to his island’s edge to see a ship slip over the horizon.