"What a woman!" he said to himself, strangely troubled a moment later when
she was gone. He had not looked at the book again. It lay forgotten by his
pillow.
"What a woman!" he repeated, with a sigh that was like a groan.
Her bringing of the book--her unusual conversation--her excitement--her
seriousness--the impression she made upon him that a new problem was
beginning to work itself out in her life--most of all that one startling
revelation of herself at the instant of turning away: all these occupied his
thoughts that day.
She did not return the next or the next or the next. And, it was during
these long vacant hours that he began to weave curiously together all that
he had ever heard of her and of her past; until, in the end, he accomplished
something like a true restoration of her life--in the colour of his own
emotions. Then he fell to wandering up and down this long vista of scenes as
he might have sought unwearied secret gallery of pictures through which he
alone had the privilege of walking.
At the far end of the vista he could behold her in her childhood as the
daughter of a cavalier land-holder in the valley of the James: an heiress of
a vast estate with its winding creeks and sunny bays, its tobacco
plantations worked by troops of slaves, its deer parks and open country for
the riding to hounds. There was the manor-house in the style of the grand
places of the English gentry from whom her father was descended; sloping
from the veranda to the river landing a wide lawn covered with the silvery
grass of the English parks, its walks bordered with hedges of box, its
summer-house festooned with vines, its terraces gay with the old familiar
shrubs and flowers loyally brought over from the mother land. He could see
her as, some bright summer morning, followed by a tame fawn, she bounded
down the lawn to the private landing where a slow frigate had stopped to
break bulk on its way to Williamsburg-perhaps to put out with other
furniture a little mahogany chair brought especially for herself over the
rocking sea from London or where some round-sterned packet from New England
or New Amsterdam was unloading its cargo of grain or hides or rum in
exchange for her father's tobacco. Perhaps to greet her father himself
returning from a long absence amid old scenes that still could draw him back
to England; or standing lonely on the pier, to watch in tears him and her
brothers--a vanishing group--as they waved her a last good-bye and drifted
slowly out to the blue ocean on their way "home" to school at Eton.