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      THE LIE ABSOLUTE

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      THE tradesmen's books, orderly spread, lay on the rose-wood writing-table, each adorned by its own just pile of gold and silver coin. The books at the White House were paid weekly, and paid in cash. It had always been so. The brown holland blinds were lowered half-way. The lace curtains almost met across the windows. Thus, while, without, July blazed on lawns and paths and borders, in this room a cool twilight reigned. A leisured quiet, an ordered ease, reigned there too, as they had done for every day of Dorothea's thirty-five years. The White House was one of those to which no change comes. None but Death, and Death, however he may have wrung the heart or stunted the soul of the living, had been powerless to change outward seemings. Dorothea had worn a black dress for a while, and she best knew what tears she had wept and for what long months the ​light of life had gone out of all things. But the tears had not blinded her eyes to the need of a mirror-polish on the old mahogany furniture, and all through those months there had been, at least, the light of duty. The house must be kept as her dead mother had kept it. The three prim maids and the gardener had been "in the family" since Dorothea was a girl of twenty—a girl with hopes and dreams and fond imaginings that, spreading bright wings, wandered over a world far other than this dainty, delicate, self-improving, coldly charitable, unchanging existence. Well, the dreams and the hopes and the fond imaginings had come home to roost. He who had set them flying had gone away: he had gone to see the world. He had not come back. He was seeing it still; and all that was left of a girl's first romance was in certain neat packets of foreign letters in the drawer of the rose-wood table, and in the disciplined soul of the woman who sat before it "doing the books." Monday was the day for this. Every day had its special duties: every duty its special hour. While the mother had stayed there had been love to give life to this life that was hardly life ​at all. Now the mother was gone it sometimes seemed to Dorothea that she had not lived for these fifteen years—and that even the life before had been less life than a dream of it. She sighed.

      "I'm old," she said, "and I'm growing silly."

      She put her pen neatly in the inkstand tray: it was an old silver pen, and an old inkstand of Sevres porcelain. Then she went out into the garden by the French window, muffled in jasmine, and found herself face to face with a stranger, a straight well-set-up man of forty or thereabouts, with iron-grey hair and a white moustache. Before his hand had time to reach the Panama hat she knew him, and her heart leaped up and sank sick and trembling. But she said:—

      "To whom have I the pleasure—?"

      The man caught her hands.

      "Why, Dolly," he said, "don't you know me? I should have known you anywhere."

      A rose-flush deepened on her face.

      "It can't be Robert?"

      "Can't it? And how are you, Dolly? ​Everything's just the same—By Jove! the very same heliotropes and pansies in the very same border—and the jasmine and the sundial and everything."

      "They tell me the trees have grown," she said. "I like to think it's all the same. Why didn't you tell me you were coming home? Come in."

      She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds.

      "I don't know. I wanted to surprise you—and, by George! I've surprised myself. It's beautiful. It's all just as it used to be, Dolly."

      The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be.

      "I'll tell them you're staying for lunch."

      She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to catch strongly at her lost composure.

      If anyone had had the right to ask the reason of her agitation, and had asked it, Dorothea would have said that the sudden happening of ​anything was enough to upset one in whose life nothing ever happened. But no one had the right.

      She went into the kitchen to give the necessary orders.

      "Not the mince," she said; "or, stay. Yes, that would do, too. You must cook the fowl that was for to-night's dinner—and Jane can go down to the village for something else for to-night. And salad and raspberries. And I will put out some wine. My cousin, Mr. Courtenay, has come home from India. He will lunch with me."

      "Master Bob," said the cook, as the kitchen door closed, "well, if I ever did! He's a married man by this time, with young folkses growing up around him, I shouldn't wonder. He never did look twice the same side of the road where she was. Poor Miss Dolly!"

      Most of us are mercifully ignorant of the sympathy that surrounds us.

      "It's wonderful," he said, when she rejoined him in the drawing-room. "I feel like the Prodigal Son. When I think of the drawing-rooms I've seen. The gim-crack trumpery, the ​curtains and the pictures and the furniture constantly shifted, the silly chatter, the obvious curios, the commonplace rarities, the inartistic art, and the brainless empty chatter, spiteful as often as not, and all the time this has been going on beautifully, quietly, perfectly. Dolly, you're a lucky girl!"

      To her face the word brought a flush that almost justified it.

      They talked: and he told her how all these long years he had wearied for the sight of English fields, and gardens, of an English home like this—till he almost believed that he was speaking the truth.

      He looked at Dorothea with long, restful hands quietly folded, as she talked in the darkened drawing-room, at Dorothea with busy, skilful hands among the old silver and the old glass and the old painted china at lunch. He listened through the drowsy afternoon to Dorothea's gentle, high-bred, low-toned voice, to the music of her soft, rare laugh, as they sat in the wicker-chairs under the weeping ash on the lawn.

      And he thought of other women—a crowd of them, with high, shrill tones and constant foolish ​cackle of meaningless laughter; of the atmosphere of paint, powder, furbelows, flirtation, empty gaiety, feverish flippancy. He thought, too, of women, two and three, whose faces stood out from the crowd СКАЧАТЬ