"You're not at all what I expected," she said abruptly. "I was afraid of what I would see, and I didn't dare to look at you when you arrived last night;--but twenty times I turned the handle of your bedroom door. At last, I poked my head in when you were asleep, just to know the worst.--I nearly dropped the candle when I saw your little head on the pillow."
"What did you expect?" the girl said faintly.
"A great, coarse, fine woman, snoring," said Lady Henrietta.
All at once she bent forward, putting her knitting into the girl's hands. There was significance in the gesture.
"Pick up that stitch for me," she said. "He never liked ladders in his stockings."
There was no shake in the hard jauntiness of her voice, but the girl, searching with bent head for the dropped stitch, felt her fingers tremble as they touched the rough worsted--felt something pluck at her heart. Barnaby was dead, and she had never known him; but he was the one real person walking through a dream in which she had lost herself.
She was not strong yet. She still had a trick of putting out her hand to some steady object when she stood up alone. And at first she had not understood--too ill to question, not wondering. It was as if she had died one night and awakened to a consciousness of protection, a mystery of care and kindness, of strangers who took charge of her, treating her like a precious doll. When she at last knew the reason, she had felt like one who, falling from a precipice, found herself clinging, the dizzy horror stopped by a branch;--she could not let it go.
So they had found her, and brought her over the sea, and put her to bed in a great, comfortable room, in a house that was haunted. It was Barnaby's house, and it was for Barnaby's sake that people were kind to her. Somehow they were all shadows to her beside the thought of him. His name had been invoked to shelter her; it had been enough to lift her out of despair. She had begun to feel safe in a confused assurance that she belonged to him.
She remembered last night. She remembered the door sliding softly, and a rustle in the room, and how she had lain quite still, shutting her eyes, holding her breath, startled out of sleep. Someone was smoothing the bedclothes under her chin. She longed to cover her face, but could not. It was not a ghost, for mortal fingers had touched her cheek. Soon the rustle had withdrawn from her bedside, and she had heard a little sound that might have been a sigh. Afterwards the door had closed, and the room was empty.
