Hartley--dare it be confessed--was all this time hoping against hope that she was not noticing the too-often clipped fringe about his trouser heels. And the truth was this shrewd and sharp-eyed lady had noticed the tell-tale fringe, but she also had seen a clean-limbed and clear-featured young man, who carried himself with an air of quiet dignity that was well worth studying, and that would look uncommonly well in a theater-box.
It all ended in a promise from him that he would run up some morning and exercise one of her horses with Cordelia. Cordelia, standing silent and aloof, remembered what Hartley had said during their drive about English reticence, and threw him a glance which he could see was meant as a silent palliation of what she could not prevent. For a moment it awoke in him an inner voice of distrust, of perplexity, that left him with the feeling that a softening veil had been lifted from between them. It was as though some hand had shaken a shower of petals from the blossoming tree of enchantment and left it half bare and empty.
As he said good-by, depressed in spirits and scarcely understanding why it was, Cordelia slipped into his hand a delicately perfumed package tied with blue silk ribbon, together with a copy of The Silver Poppy.
"I want you to keep this; it was the first copy from the press," she told him. And she added that she hoped he wouldn't waste too much of his time over the manuscript. She knew he would find it all wrong, that there would be a thousand things to disappoint him. And she begged him to make whatever changes he would; she trusted him implicitly.
"I'm afraid you'll not like it," she said timidly, coming with him to the door. She had slipped one of Mrs. Spaulding's hothouse rosebuds into his button-hole, and she touched it with her fingers with a gesture that meant much. He would have taken her hand, but she drew it back quickly.
"It's been so hard for me to write things this time," she lamented. "I feel that it's all going to fall flat. But whatever happens," and her eyes were eloquent with something more than gratitude, "I've had the happiest morning of my life."
And she closed the door quietly, and left him there. As he stepped out into the hard light of noonday, once more he felt that vague impression of unrest, that reaction of despondency which he had often enough felt when emerging from the music and romance of a theater and passing out into the garish lights and noises of a workaday world. He, too, felt that his day was over and done.