An hour glided past and Cordelia did not return. Hartley took up a novel from the table, and when another long hour dragged on he became uneasy. He went to the foot of the stairs and called her. Then he rang for the servants, but could get no response to his summons; they were all either out at the moment or beyond sound of the bells.
He went to her study and tapped on the door. Hearing no sound, he opened it and glanced in, but she was not there. He hesitated a moment, then went from silent room to room through the great, quiet house in search of her.
He found her at last in a nook of the upper west hall, which he had heard Mrs. Spaulding speak of as the Quietude. She was bending over the last pages of his manuscript in the paling evening light at the window, curled up, cat-like, in a huge armchair. Her lips were slightly parted, and as her white face bent over those last pages of his story some eager, luminous hunger that dwelt in her eyes held Hartley spellbound. He watched her without speaking.
When the last page was read she looked up slowly and let her absent eyes dwell on him as her lips murmured something he could not catch. Then he laughed a little and stepped toward her through the twilight.
At his first step he saw that he had been mistaken. She had neither heard nor seen him. But she did not cry out, only a deadly whiteness swept over her already pale face, and she put her hand up to her heart with a quick little motion.
In a moment her fright had passed and she could breathe naturally once more. The pale color crept slowly back into her face.
"I thought something might have happened," he said weakly.
"How you startled me!" she gasped, growing calmer as she spoke. Then she shook her white skirts out and sat up more decorously in the chair. "You must promise me never to do it again," she said softly. "It's heredity with me, I think, for my old mammy nurse once told me it was a fright that really killed my mother. You'll promise, won't you?"
She looked at him with solemn eyes. The gray twilight fell across her face and melted into the gold of her hair. Her bottle-green gown seemed black in the dusk, and her pale features, freighted with an elusive and wistful pathos, seemed to Hartley, in that minute of fleeting but vivid impression, like the face of some sweet lady of forgotten centuries gazing out of the gloom of an old canvas. It was a face that held him musingly spellbound, in which he could see and dream of things that were not there, as in a fire by night or in a fountain by day.