"They have come. I hear Gertrude's birdish voice."
The words had scarcely passed Mr. Hammond's lips ere his niece bounded into the room, followed by her husband.
Edna was sitting on the chintz-covered lounge, mending a basketful of the old man's clothes that needed numerous stitches and buttons, and, throwing aside her sewing materials, she rose to meet the travellers.
At sight of her Gordon Leigh stopped suddenly and his face grew instantly as bloodless as her own.
"Edna! Oh! how changed! What a wreck!"
He grasped her outstretched hand, folded it in his, which trembled violently, and a look of anguish mastered his features, as his eyes searched her calm countenance.
"I did not think it would come so soon. Passing away in the early morning of your life! Oh, my pure, broken lily!"
He did not seem to heed his wife's presence, until she threw her arms around Edna, exclaiming: "Get away, Gordon! I want her all to myself. Why, you pale darling! What a starved ghost you are! Not half as substantial as my shadow, is she, Gordon? Oh, Edna! how I have longed to see you, to tell you how I enjoyed your dear, delightful, grand, noble book! To tell you what a great woman I think you are; and how proud of you I am. A gentleman who came over in the steamer with us, asked me how much you paid me per annum to puff you. He was a miserable old cynic of a bachelor, ridiculed all women unmercifully, and at last I told him I would bet both my ears that the reason he was so bearish and hateful, was because some pretty girl had flirted with him outrageously. He turned up his ugly nose especially at 'blue stockings'; said all literary women were 'hopeless pedants and slatterns,' and quoted that abominable Horace Walpole's account of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'dirt and vivacity.' I really thought Gordon would throw him overboard. I wonder what he would say if he could see you darning Uncle Allan's socks. Oh, Edna, dearie! I am sorry to find you looking so pale."
All this was uttered interjectionally between vigorous hugs and warm, tender kisses, and as Gertrude threw her bonnet and wrappings on the lounge, she continued: "I wished for you just exactly ten thousand times while I was abroad, there were so many things that you could have described so beautifully. Gordon, don't Edna's eyes remind you very much of that divine picture of the Madonna at Dresden?"
She looked round for an answer, but her husband had left the room, and, recollecting a parcel that had been stowed away in the pocket of the carriage, she ran out to get it.