“But I don’t see any stone wall,” protested Miss Ferrier.
Sister Cecilia laughed. “I see it distinctly, and so will you next year. There are piles of stones on the land which will save us a good deal of money; and we are very likely to have some work done for nothing. Do you know how kind the laborers are to us? Twenty men have offered to do each a day’s work in our garden free of charge. Those are two of them. Now, here we are going to have a large arbor covered with honeysuckle and roses. It must be closed on the east side, because there will be a river-road outside the wall some day, and we should be visible from it. But the south side will be all open, so we can sit under the roses and look down that beautiful river and over all the city. You see the knoll was made on purpose for an arbor.”
As they went into the house, a slender shape glided past in the dusk of the further entry. The light from a roof window, shining down the stairs, revealed a face like a lily drooped a little sidewise, a wealth of brown hair gathered back, and a sweet, shy smile. It was as though some one had carried a lighted waxen taper through the shadows where she disappeared.
“It is Anita!” exclaimed Miss Ferrier, stopping on the threshold of the parlor. “Why did she not come to us?”
“That dear Anita!” said the sister. “She has a piano lesson to give at this hour, and would not dream of turning aside from the shortest road to the music-room. If you were her own mother, Mme. Chevreuse, she would not come to you without permission. Yet such a tender, loving creature I never knew before. Obedience is the law of her life. Next spring she will begin her novitiate.”
The house was looked over, the other sisters seen, and the offerings brought them duly presented and acknowledged; then the two ladies started for home.
Miss Ferrier was rather silent when they were alone. She had not forgotten the reproof of the morning, and she felt aggrieved by it. Mrs. Chevreuse had known that she was but jesting, and might have been a little less touchy, she thought. What was the matter that almost every one was finding fault with her lately? Her mother accused her of being cross and captious, her lover found her exacting, and Mrs. Gerald had thought her too assuming on one occasion, and yet all she was conscious of was a blind feeling of loss—some such sense as deep-buried roots may have when the sky grows dark over the tree above. Little things that once would have passed by like the idle wind now had power to make her shrink, as the lightest touch will hurt a sore; and trifles that had once given her pleasure now fell dead and flat. The time had been when the mere driving through the city in her showy carriage had elated her, when she had sat in delighted consciousness of the satin cushions, the glittering harness and wheels, and even of the band on the coachman’s hat and the capes that fluttered from his shoulders. Now they sometimes gave her a feeling of weary disgust, and she assured herself that she knew not why. If any suspicion glanced across her mind that a worm was eating into the very centre of her rose of life, and the outer petals withered merely because the heart was withering, she shut her eyes to it, and kept seeking here and there for comfort, but found none. Honora was the only person who ever really soothed her; and, for some reason, or for no reason, even Honora’s soothing now and then held a sting that was keenly felt.
“Is it possible she is resenting my reproof?” thought Mrs. Chevreuse, and exerted herself to be pleasant and friendly, but without much success. Miss Ferrier’s affected gaiety was gone, and she had no disposition to resume it.
“She is not so good-tempered as I believed,” the priest’s mother thought when they parted, with one of those unjust judgments which the good form quite as often as the bad.
Miss Ferrier drove on homeward. She had no need to tell the coachman which way to drive, nor how, for he knew perfectly well that he was to make his horses prance slowly through Bank Street, where, in a certain insurance office up one flight of a granite building, Mr. Lawrence Gerald bit his nails and fumed over a clerk’s desk, and half attended to his business while inwardly protesting against what he called his misfortunes. Perhaps his desk faced the window, or maybe his companions were good enough to call his attention to it; for it seldom happened that Miss Ferrier, glancing up, did not see him waiting to bow to her. He did not love the girl, but he felt a trivial pride in contemplating the evidences of that wealth which was one day to be his unless he should change his mind. He sometimes admitted the possibility of the latter alternative.