“Tell Mrs. Mayo I shall be down in a minute,” she said.
It was not a lady, Mathilde replied, but a monsieur.
Honora took the card. For a long time she sat staring at it, while Mathilde waited. It read:
Mr. Peter Erwin.
“Madame will see monsieur?”
A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model: “Wear your old coat. There is as much of a man in the back of his old coat, I think, as there is in his face.” As Honora halted on the threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass window, and his back was to her.
She was suddenly stricken. Not since she had been a child, not even in the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain. And as a child, self-pity seized her—as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will fails and distance appalls. Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that he heard. He turned and crossed the room to her as she had known he would, and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by when, hurt and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her. For the moment, the delusion that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith whole again, so many times had he mended a world all awry.
He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own. He did not speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased to tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less frequent.
“Why did you come? Why did you come?” she cried.
“To see you, Honora.”