The door opened slowly, timorously, and Cordelia stood before him, with her hand on the knob.
She looked at him in silence, studying his impassive face with pleading, unwavering eyes, seeming to drink in every detail of feature and expression, searching for something she had, perhaps, half-hoped to find there, startled, too, at the change in him.
"John," she said, in a whisper, taking a step toward him. He looked at her, unrelaxed, without moving.
"John," she whispered once more, pitifully, creeping a step or two closer to him, and stopping again.
She was dressed all in black, and wore a heavy black-plumed hat that framed the white oval of her face; it was a face that looked tired and wan and touched with the twilight of lost happiness. In her hand she carried a great cluster of lilies of the valley. Their sickly, heavy, penetrating fragrance surrounded her and floated in with her, until Hartley himself could smell it. For all the rest of her days the odor of lilies of the valley was hateful to her.
She stood there for a moment, still hesitating, and then turned and closed the door, which had remained open behind her.
"You--you are not going away?" she gasped.
He was glad, inwardly, that it was all definitely settled, that no mischance could now turn him back, that even his own hand could no longer bar his outward way.
"I'm going to England to-morrow," he said, impassively. He stooped and turned the key in his steamer-trunk with a movement of determined conclusiveness that did not escape her.
She crept toward him, meekly, wistfully; she touched him with her hand. He was sallow and shrunken, with new, hard lines about the once boyish mouth; but to the woman who clutched at his arm, he was a lover clothed in beauty and a liberating angel of redemption in one.
"John," she said, in a low half-sob, "you won't--you can't leave me, without a word?"
He drew back from her; he, too, was humbled and broken, but the pride of his youth and the pride of his race still clung to him.
"There is nothing for me to say," he answered, coldly. He asked himself fiercely why he had half-heartedly wished, so many times, to see her but once, before going.
With a sudden impetuous movement she ran to him and flung her arms about him, clinging to him, panting and shaken.