For a little while she sat on the big lounge, her dreamy eyes fixed on
the spot where Clive's father had stood and she remembered Jacques
Renouf, too, and the lost city of Yhdunez.... And, somehow her
memories receded still further toward earlier years; and she thought
of the sunny office where Mr. Wahlbaum used to sit; and she seemed to
see the curtains stirring in the wind.
After a while she rose and walked slowly along the hall to her own
room.
Everything was there as she had left it; the toilet silver, evidently
kept clean and bright by Michael, the little Dresden cupids on the
mantel, the dainty clock, still running--further confirmation of
Michael's ministrations--the fresh linen on the bed. Nothing had been
changed through all these changing years. She softly opened the
clothes-press door; there hung her gowns--silent witnesses of her
youth, strangely and daintily grotesque in fashion. One by one she
examined them, a smile edging her lips, and, in her eyes, tears.
All revery is tinged with melancholy; and it was so with her when she
stood among the forgotten gowns of years ago.
It was so, too, when, one by one she unlocked and opened the drawers
of dresser and bureau. From soft, ordered heaps of silk and lace and
sheerest linen a faint perfume mounted; and it was as though she
subtly renewed an exquisite and secret intimacy with a youth and
innocence half-forgotten in the sadder wisdom of later days.
* * * * *
From the still and scented twilight of a vanished year, to her own
apartment perched high above the sun-smitten city she went, merely to
find herself again, and look around upon what fortune had brought to
her through her own endeavour.
But, somehow, the old prejudices had gone; the old instincts of pride
and independence had been obliterated, merged in a serene and tranquil
unity of mind and will and spirit with the man in whom every atom of
her belief and faith was now centred.
It mattered no longer to her what material portion of her possessions
and environment was due to her own efforts, or to his. Nothing that
might be called hers could remain conceivable as hers unless he shared
it. Their rights in each other included everything temporal and
spiritual; everything of mind and matter alike. Of what consequence,
then, might be the origin of possessions that could not exist for her
unless possession were mutual?
Nothing would be real to her, nothing of value, unless so marked by
his interest and his approval. And now she knew that even the world
itself must become but a shadow, were he not living to make it real.