Gilbert did not undertake to answer the question, and she said, “But I am so glad you have told me so much about him. How proud I shall be to surprise him with it all!”
Gilbert made no sign of sharing her rapture, but she seemed not to heed him.
They were very near the house, now, and she turned on him an upward, sidelong look, as her lower stature obliged, and asked, “And you really think me worthy to be sorry?”
“Yes,” said Gilbert, with a heavy breath.
“Then I’ll forget your cruelty,” she said; “but don’t do it any more.” She dropped him a little nod, and went into the house without him. He stood there watching the black doorway through which she had vanished, but it was as if he had followed her, so wholly had all sense fled after her out of his face. He stirred painfully from his posture, and cast his eye upward at Easton’s room. The cold window met his glance with a gleam from which he shrank, with a sudden shock at the heart, as though he had caught Easton’s eye, and he turned and walked away into the nightfall.
Chapter XI
EASTON began to show signs of decided convalescence. Day by day he became more susceptible of the kindnesses which his sympathizers yearned to lavish upon him, all the more ardently for being so long held aloof by the certainty that the best thing they could do was to let him alone; the ladies got out their recipes for sick-room delicacies again, and broths and broils were debated. One day he sat up in a chair to have his bed made, and then a great wave of rejoicing ran through the house. Mrs. Farrell created a wine jelly which, when it was turned out of the mold upon a plate, was as worshipfully admired as if it had been the successful casting in bronze of some great work of art.
Her spirits had begun to rise; that day she moved as if on air, and as he grew better and better she put off the moral and material tokens of her lingering bondage to fear. For some time she had suffered herself to wear those great hoops of Etruscan gold in her ears; now she replaced her penitential slippers and sober shoes with worldly boots; she blossomed again in the rich colors that became her; on the following Sunday she celebrated her release in a silk that insulted her past captivity, and sang for joy as she swooped through the house in it. On Monday she bought out the small stock of worsteds at the West Pekin store, and sat matching them in her lap when Gilbert came out upon the piazza. He stopped to look at her, and she asked him if he had any taste in colors. “Men have, a great deal oftener than women will allow,” she said. “At least they are quite apt to have inspirations in color.”
“I don’t believe I have,” answered Gilbert, still looking at her radiance and not at the worsteds. “I lived long and happily without knowing some colors from others by name.”
Mrs. Farrell laughed. “Oh, I didn’t mean the names. Women are glibber than men with those. But you’d have been able to criticize the effect, wouldn’t you? You’d have known that blue wouldn’t do for a brunette, if you’d seen it on her?”