It was a full hour before Fanny came upstairs. Nan had been waiting for her in the guest’s room, where she had had the luggage taken. As Fanny came in, the look of her struck Nan afresh as being past all precedent attractive and appealing. Her colour was now heightened, evidently by the interview with Cary, and her eyes were full of all manner of strange lights. She had not yet removed her hat, and somehow the whole effect of her was that of one poised but a moment at a resting place on a journey full of both excitement and peril.
The two met in the middle of the large and airy room.
“Well, dear--and aren’t you going to take off your hat and settle down?” Nan put up her hand to remove the demurely becoming hat in question. “Why didn’t you take it off downstairs and rest your head?”
“I felt better armoured for defense with it. Never mind taking it off--I’m going out again.”
“Doesn’t one, when a determined young man wants to marry one out of hand? I’ve only succeeded in putting him off for an hour or two, at that. He says he may go any day, and on seeing me just now he realized he couldn’t go without leaving me behind securely tied. What do you think of that, for a poor girl just from a funeral, to be confronted with a wedding?”
“That’s what I said--‘But, Cary----’ In fact, I never got further than that, though I tried it ten times over.”
“But did you--give him any encouragement?”
“Did I? Well, now, knowing me--as you think you do--what’s your idea of it?”
Nan studied her, without answering. Her gaze dropped from Fanny’s face to her black-clad shoulder, then suddenly she put her arm about that shoulder.
“I’m forgetting,” she said, gravely, “that you have lost a friend. I’m sorry. Somehow I didn’t expect to see you in black, and can’t yet realize that it means bereavement.”
“What a subtle way of telling me that my particular kind of black doesn’t wholly suggest bereavement! Well, my dear--it seemed to me only decent to show some respect to an old man who has been very decent to me, and left me enough to buy silk stockings and pumps in which to mourn him, to say nothing of other accessories. I don’t think he would have approved of henrietta cloth and crêpe--and besides--what I’m wearing suits me better, don’t you think? How do you imagine it will impress the Reverend Robert? I’ve already noted its effect on one young man. Can I hope to make another lose his head within the hour?”