He had evidently forgotten her very existence!
No wonder! A plain woman with smoked spectacles and a bald forehead. So she characterized herself. That was all she had allowed him to see of her. She stood there for a very long time, watching him, her hand raised to her face ready to veil it in case he should look up. She had no scruples, for if he had objected to being looked at, he would have pulled down the blind.
Every now and then, a ripe pear, ruined by the insidious wasp that preyed on it secretly, fell heavily down on the sodden earth under the window, and startled her, but he never raised his head. She ceased to expect him to do so, and stood at ease, listening to the various puzzling night sounds and quite unconscious of the flight of time. Queer noises came from the great, mysterious demesne on the other side of the house—that excess of rank foliage in which it seemed that every known variety of animal might find a home; it was so “whick,” in local parlance, so full of all the forms of sylvan life, crawling, creeping, rustling in among the long grasses and twisted boughs all through the summer night. Presently, the short, sharp bark of a fox, that came from the covert, did penetrate to his ears through the thickness of the pane; he looked up, seemed to stare at her, and she fled.
CHAPTER IV
A maid deposited a can of hot water, and knocked at Mrs. Elles’ door next morning, as the latter had desired her to do over night. Thinking, perhaps, of her faithful Jane, she sleepily called out “Come in!” from force of habit.
The servant stared at the new inmate of the “Heather Bell,” unrestrainedly, as she lay there, in bed, her pretty hair ruffled over her forehead, and the disfiguring spectacles lying on the dressing-table beside her. Mrs. Elles did not know what hour it was; she had left her watch behind her in Newcastle, but she was sure she had been lying awake for hours and hours, listening to the bewildering chorus of birds from the pear tree all round her window, and the rub-a-dub of the churning in the yard below.
“Nine o’clock, you say? Why did you not call me earlier? Has Mr. Rivers gone out sketching already?” was her first thoughtless question.
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Does he go every day?” Mrs. Elles further enquired, forgetting, too, to correct the title.
“Every day, unless it rains.”