Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope, having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young man single handed.
But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being concentrated in expectation,—almost, as it were, in listening,—through her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.
The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday special.
"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it—you would only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I know how distasteful the idea—the horribly melodramatic and sensational idea—must be to you—"
"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to Herrick unopened. "No,—say what you please of me. It is sure to be only too good. Well, and if not?—What does it matter?" She closed her eyes, and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.
"But—" he ventured.
"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do—give it to my mother. You will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that do?—Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"
"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."
"Then they can both read it."
Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come back?"