That, she told him, was her case also. He told her how he had heard her come in, and how he had hated to take either the obvious course of following her to the kitchen, saying "How do you do?" and retiring to New Romney; or the still more obvious course of sneaking away without asking her how she did. And he told her how he had decided to keep watch over her from the bicycle shed. And how the coal-black inspiration had come to him. And she laughed.
"That was much more literary than anything else you could have thought of," said she; "it was exactly like a book. And oh—you've no idea how funny you looked."
They both laughed, and there was a silence.
"Do you know," he said, "I can hardly believe that this is the first meal we've ever had alone together? It seems as though—"
"It is funny," she said, smiling hurriedly at him.
He did not smile. He said: "I want you to tell me why you were so angel-good—why did you let me stay? Why did you lay the pretty table for two?"
"Because we've never been in the same mood at the same time," she said desperately; "and somehow I thought we should be this evening."
"What mood?" he asked inexorably.
"Why—jolly—cheerful," she said, with the slightest possible hesitation.
"I see."
There was another silence. Then she said in a voice that fluttered a little—
"My old governess. Miss Pettingill—you remember old Pet? Well, she's coming by the train that gets in at three. I wired to her from town. She ought to be here by now—"
"Ought she?" he cried, pushing back his chair and coming towards her—"ought she? Then, by heaven! before she comes I'm going to tell you something—"
"No, don't!" she cried. "You'll spoil everything. Go and sit down again. You shall! I insist! Let me tell you! I always swore I would some day!"
"Why?" said he, and sat down.
"Because I knew you'd never make up your mind to tell me—"
"To tell you what?"
"Anything—for fear you should have to say it in the same way someone else had said it before!"
"Said what?"
"Anything! Sit still! Now I'm going to tell you."
She came slowly round the table and knelt on one knee beside him, her elbows on the arm of his chair.
"You've never had the courage to make up your mind to anything," she began.
"Is that what you were going to tell me?" he asked, and looked in her eyes till she dropped their lids.
"No—yes—no! I haven't anything to tell you really. Good night."
"Aren't you going to tell me?"
"There isn't anything to tell," she said.
"Then I'll tell you," said he.
She started up, and the little brass knocker's urgent summons resounded through the bungalow.
"Here she is!" she cried.
He also sprang to his feet.
"And we haven't told each other anything!" he said.
"Haven't we? Ah, no—don't! Let me go! There—she's knocking again. You must let me go!"
He let her slip through his arms.
At the door she paused to flash a soft, queer smile at him.
"It was I who told you, after all!" she said. "Aren't you glad? Because that wasn't a bit literary."
"You didn't. I told you," he retorted.
"Not you!" she said scornfully. "That would have been too obvious."
THE LIE ABSOLUTE
THE tradesmen's books, orderly spread, lay on the rose-wood writing-table, each adorned by its own just pile of gold and silver coin. The books at the White House were paid weekly, and paid in cash. It had always been so. The brown holland blinds were lowered half-way. The lace curtains almost met across the windows. Thus, while, without, July blazed on lawns and paths and borders, in this room a cool twilight reigned. A leisured quiet, an ordered ease, reigned there too, as they had done for every day of Dorothea's thirty-five years. The White House was one of those to which no change comes. None but Death, and Death, however he may have wrung the heart or stunted the soul of the living, had been powerless to change outward seemings. Dorothea had worn a black dress for a while, and she best knew what tears she had wept and for what long months the light of life had gone out of all things. But the tears had not blinded her eyes to the need of a mirror-polish on the old mahogany furniture, and all through those months there had been, at least, the light of duty. The house must be kept as her dead mother had kept it. The three prim maids and the gardener had been "in the family" since Dorothea was a girl of twenty—a girl with hopes and dreams and fond imaginings that, spreading bright wings, wandered over a world far other than this dainty, delicate, self-improving, coldly charitable, unchanging existence. Well, the dreams and the hopes and the fond imaginings had come home to roost. He who had set them flying had gone away: he had gone to see the world. He had not come back. He was seeing it still; and all that was left of a girl's first romance was in certain neat packets of foreign letters in the drawer of the rose-wood table, and in the disciplined soul of the woman who sat before it "doing the books." Monday was the day for this. Every day had its special duties: every duty its special hour. While the mother had stayed there had been love to give life to this life that was hardly life at all. Now the mother was gone it sometimes seemed to Dorothea that she had not lived for these fifteen years—and that even the life before had been less life than a dream of it. She sighed.
"I'm old," she said, "and I'm growing silly."
She put her pen neatly in the inkstand tray: it was an old silver pen, and an old inkstand of Sevres porcelain. Then she went out into the garden by the French window, muffled in jasmine, and found herself face to face with a stranger, a straight well-set-up man of forty or thereabouts, with iron-grey hair and a white moustache. Before his hand had time to reach the Panama hat she knew him, and her heart leaped up and sank sick and trembling. But she said:—
"To whom have I the pleasure—?"
The man caught her hands.
"Why, Dolly," he said, "don't you know me? I should have known you anywhere."
A rose-flush deepened on her face.
"It can't be Robert?"
"Can't it? And how are you, Dolly? Everything's just the same—By Jove! the very same heliotropes and pansies in the very same border—and the jasmine and the sundial and everything."
"They tell me the trees have grown," she said. "I like to think it's all the same. Why didn't you tell me you were coming home? Come in."
She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds.
"I don't know. I wanted to surprise you—and, by George! I've surprised myself. It's beautiful. It's all just as it used to be, Dolly."
The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be.
"I'll tell them you're staying for lunch."
She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to