A month had passed. The autumn sunshine was bright even in the murky streets, and the clocks in the neighborhood were just striking two, as Magdalen returned alone to the house in Aaron’s Buildings.
“Is he waiting for me?” she asked, anxiously, when the landlady let her in.
He was waiting in the front room. Magdalen stole up the stairs and knocked at the door. He called to her carelessly and absently to come in, plainly thinking that it was only the servant who applied for permission to enter the room.
“You hardly expected me so soon?” she said speaking on the threshold, and pausing there to enjoy his surprise as he started to his feet and looked at her.
The only traces of illness still visible in her face left a delicacy in its outline which added refinement to her beauty. She was simply dressed in muslin. Her plain straw bonnet had no other ornament than the white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed. She had never looked lovelier in her best days than she looked now, as she advanced to the table at which he had been sitting, with a little basket of flowers that she had brought with her from the country, and offered him her hand.
He looked anxious and careworn when she saw him closer. She interrupted his first inquiries and congratulations to ask if he had remained in London since they had parted—if he had not even gone away, for a few days only, to see his friends in Suffolk? No; he had been in London ever since. He never told her that the pretty parsonage house in Suffolk wanted all those associations with herself in which the poor four walls at Aaron’s Buildings were so rich. He only said he had been in London ever since.
“I wonder,” she asked, looking him attentively in the face, “if you are as happy to see me again as I am to see you?”
“Perhaps I am even happier, in my different way,” he answered, with a smile.
She took off her bonnet and scarf, and seated herself once more in her own arm-chair. “I suppose this street is very ugly,” she said; “and I am sure nobody can deny that the house is very small. And yet—and yet it feels like coming home again. Sit there where you used to sit; tell me about yourself. I want to know all that you have done, all that you have thought even, while I have been away.” She tried to resume the endless succession of questions by means of which she was accustomed to lure him into speaking of himself. But she put them far less spontaneously, far less adroitly, than usual. Her one all-absorbing anxiety in entering that room was not an anxiety to be trifled with. After a quarter of an hour wasted in constrained inquiries on one side, in reluctant replies on the other, she ventured near the dangerous subject at last.