Then swinging around, he started back at a run for Comanche Point.
CHAPTER XXXVII—The Dawn of Comprehension
ALL through the afternoon at La Siesta, Merle was in a meditative mood. After luncheon Mrs. Darlington had returned to her letter-writing and her book-keeping. Munson and Grace had departed for a walk through the pine woods, after vain but not too strenuous endeavors to get Merle to accompany them. Left to her own resources she had retired to the drawing room, had tried to interest herself at the piano, but after a little while had given up the attempt; and, coiled in a big chair, had surrendered herself to a “big think,” as she mentally termed it.
In that momentary searching of the eyes between her and Mr. Robles just before their parting in the rose garden, there had come a flash of revelation to her soul. She had divined a yearning in his gaze that was surely more than the affection of an old and devoted friend. There was passionate tenderness that belied the gentle yet almost perfunctory kiss on the brow that he had finally bestowed at parting. Nor had she failed to notice the restraint which the strong man had imposed upon himself. And strangely enough, her own momentary impulse had been to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him, just as a fond daughter might have kissed a father at such an emotional moment—on the eve of a long journey, the whither unrevealed, the return all so uncertain.
She recalled, too, their previous conversation while she was gathering the roses—his words of kindly wisdom, his little bits of advice that now seemed to be weighted by more than mere friendly interest in her future happiness. Then her mind traveled back slowly, step by step, all the way to childhood days—a long vista marked by his comings and his goings, his prolonged absences, his unexpected but always welcome reappearances, his numberless acts of thoughtful kindness. Once she had been seriously ill, when a little girl, and the memory of that illness had ever been the memory of his face hovering over her cot, night and day, till the crisis had been passed and she had been on the way to assured convalescence.
There had always been an air of mystery about Mr. Robles, but she had never sought to penetrate it, instinctively recognizing that there had been some great sorrow in his life, and almost unconsciously accepting the affectionate regard he had lavished on Grace and herself as some sort of consolation for him in his loneliness. She knew that Grace was only her sister in name, but none the less Grace was to her a real sister, just as Mrs. Darlington was a real mother—the only mother she had ever known. Weaving together now the threads of memory, she became conscious of the mystery in her own life. There was assuredly some fuller story than the story she had been told in the past and had always tacitly accepted—that her parents had been neighbors and dear friends of Mrs. Darlington in the long ago, and when they had died, the baby girl left behind had been bequeathed to her motherly care.
At this stage in her ruminations Merle sat bolt upright in her chair. The shadows of evening were beginning to close around her, but the dawn of revelation was in her heart.
Would Mrs. Darlington still be alone in her boudoir? Merle answered the unspoken thought by stealing from the room.