‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’
‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been away.’
‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.
‘My dear lady, _who_ are coming here to-night?’
Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.
This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a moment.’
So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment afterwards.
‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’
‘The most,’ said I; ‘but I know it well. There was a great friend of mine who used to live here----’
‘Dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in South Africa? He was a distant cousin of mine.’
‘That you are absolutely the living image of her.’
‘Oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance of somebody’s. I shall have to live up to her. I do hope she wasn’t very nice. It will be so difficult for me if she was.’
‘She and Dick were the greatest friends I ever had,’ said I.
‘Ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘It was all very sudden, was it not? The child, too!’
‘Yes, very sudden. I had been dining with her here, and she had gone upstairs when the telegram came. She heard the ring, and leaned over the banisters above the hall, and knew. Then the child was born. She died just at day-break next morning. She asked me, I remember, to pull up the blind, and said, “Let in the morning.” That was all.’