Part 52 (1/2)

”It is late,” he said, ”as you doubtless know, and I have neglected a call. May I leave you to go on alone?” Then his voice softened. ”Are you ill?” he asked--”or in pain?”

She laughed mirthlessly.

”You are too strong,” she returned, ”to stoop to irony.”

”It was not irony,” he answered, gently.

She smiled sadly, her eyes raised.

”Tell me that you will come to see me--once,” she said.

He looked at her with sudden tenderness.

”Yes,” he answered; ”I will come. Good-bye!”

”Good-bye!”

And they went different ways.

CHAPTER X

Mariana went home with throbs of elation in her heart. She was thrilled with a strange, unreasoning joy--a sense of wonder and of mystery--that caused her pulses to quiver and her feet to hasten.

”I shall see him again,” she thought--”I shall see him again.”

She forgot the years of separation, her past indifference, the barriers between them. She forgot the coldness of his voice and his accusing glance. Her nature had leaped suddenly into fulness, and a storm of pa.s.sion such as she had never known had seized her. The emotions of her girlhood seemed to her stale and bloodless beside the tempest which possessed her now. As she walked her lips trembled, and she thought, ”I shall see him again.”

At dinner Miss Ramsey noticed her flushed face, and, when they went into the drawing-room, took her hands. ”You are feverish,” she said, ”and you ate nothing.”

Mariana laughed excitedly.

”No,” she answered, ”I am well--very well.”

They sat down together, and she looked at Miss Ramsey with quick tenderness.

”Am I good to you?” she asked. ”Am I good to the servants?--to everybody?”

”What is it, dear?”

”Oh, I want to begin over again--all over again! It is but fair that one should have a second chance, is it not?”

Miss Ramsey smiled.

”Some of us never have a first,” she said; and Mariana took her in her arms and kissed her. ”You shall have yours,” she declared. ”I will give it to you.”

When she went up-stairs a little later she took down an old square desk from a shelf in the dressing-room and brought it to the rug before the fire. Kneeling beside it, she turned the key and raised the narrow lid of ink-stained mahogany. It was like unlocking the past years to sit surrounded by these memories in tangible forms, to smell the close, musty odor which clings about the relics of a life or a love that is dead.

She drew them out one by one and laid them on the hearth-rug--these faded things that seemed in some way to waft with the scent of decay unseizable a.s.sociations of long-gone joy or sorrow. The dust lay thickly over them, as the dust of forgetfulness lay over the memories they invoked. There was a letter from her mother written to her in her babyhood, and the fine, faded handwriting recalled to her the drooping figure--a slight and pa.s.sionate woman, broken by poverty and disappointments, with vivacious lips and eyes of honest Irish blue.