"I am sorry."
She smiled at him. The slow smile which transformed her. "I"ll forgive you. Call me up in the morning, please."
She let him out, and went silently up the stairs. The General was again awake. "I want to talk," he told her; "take off your cap, and sit where I can look at you."
He was still feverish, still not quite responsible for what he might say.
She sat with the light falling full upon her. She never made an unnecessary movement, and her stillness soothed him. She was a good listener, and he grew garrulous.
At last he spoke of his wife. "Sometimes I think she is here and I find myself speaking. A little while ago, I thought I heard her moving in her room, but when I opened my eyes you were bending over me.
Sometimes I seem to hear her singing--there is never a moment that I do not miss her. If I were good enough I might hope to meet her--perhaps the Lord will let the strength of my love compensate for the weakness of my will."
So on and on in the broken old voice.
Bronson came at six, and Hilda went away to have some sleep. While the General drowsed she had put the collar safely away behind the Chinese scroll.
As she pa.s.sed through the hall, she stopped for a moment at the head of the stairs. The painted lady smiled at her, the painted lady who was loved by the old man in the shadowed room.
No, Hilda was not a thief. Yet as she stood there, in the cold dawn of that Thanksgiving morning, she had it in her mind to steal from the painted lady things more precious than a pearl collar or an ermine cloak or the diamonds in a crown!
CHAPTER XII
WHEN THE MORNING STARS SANG
Jean was having her breakfast in bed. Emily had slipped downstairs to drink an early cup of coffee with the Doctor and to warn him, "Don"t tell her to-day."
"Why not?"
"It will spoil her feast. Derry Drake is coming to dinner."
"The robber--"
"Do you really feel that way about it?"
"I don"t know how I feel."
He rose and went to the window. "It"s a rotten morning."
"It is Thanksgiving."
"I haven"t much to be thankful for," moodily. "I am, you tell me, about to lose my daughter. I am, also, it would seem, to part company with my best nurse."
"Hilda?"
"Yes. I wanted her to take charge of things for me in France. She elects to stay here."
"But why?"
"She"s a--woman."
"You don"t mean that. And I must say that I am rather glad that she is not going."
It was out at last! She had a feeling as if she had taken a cold plunge and had survived it!
"Glad? What do you mean, Emily?"
"Every time I waked in the night, I thought of Jean and of how she would feel if Hilda went with you. Do you realize that if she goes, there are things that the world will say?"
His face was stern. "You are very brave to tell me that, Emily."
"It had to be said, and last night I shirked it."
"But Hilda is a very good nurse."
"Do you think of her only as a--good nurse?"
He turned that over in his mind. "No. In a sense she"s rather attractive. She satisfies a certain side of me--."
"The best side?"
He avoided an answer to that. "When she is away I miss her."
And now Miss Emily, shaking a little, but not showing it, made him face the situation squarely.
"Have you ever thought that, missing her, you might want to marry her?"
"I have thought of it. Why not, Emily?"
"Have you thought that it would make her your Jean"s--mother--?"
His startled look met her steadfast one. His mind flew back to Hilda as she had bent down to him the night before, that he might unfasten the necklace. He thought of the evil that her eyes saw in him, and in the rest of the world. He thought of Jean, and of her white young dreams.
"No," he said, as if to himself, "not that--"
She laid her hand on his arm, "Go by yourself--there"s a big work over there, and you can do it best--alone."
He looked down at her, smiling a little, but smiling sadly. "If Jean"s mother had lived I should not have been such a weatherc.o.c.k. Will you write to me--promise me that you will write."
"Of course," cheerfully. "Oh, by the way, Julia tells me that dinner will be at three, and that two soldier boys are coming. I rather think I shall like that."
He ran his fingers through his crinkled hair. "What a lot you get out of life, Emily."
"What makes you say that?"
"Little things count so much with you. You are like Jean. She is in seventh Heaven over a snowstorm--or a chocolate soda. It"s the youth in her--and it"s the youth, too, in you--"