Rob’s dog, a fine Gordon setter, came out with a boisterous barking,
but seeing who it was, leaped up, licking her hands and wagging a
friendly welcome. It seemed as if Rob ought to be somewhere near.
Everything about the place suggested him. A familiar wide-brimmed gray
hat lay on the hall table, his riding-whip beside it. Up-stairs whither
the coloured maid led her, there were other reminders of him: Indian
clubs and a tennis racquet in a corner of the hall, and a cabinet
holding the various collections that had been his fads from time to
time.
“Come in here, dear,” called Mrs. Moore from the depths of a sleepy
hollow chair. “I’m too tired to move, so I knew you’d excuse my sending
down for you to come up-stairs.”
It was Rob’s room into which she was ushered. Mrs. Moore held out
both cordial hands without rising, and drew her down for a kiss.
“Rob’s coming home to-night,” she explained, “so of course everything
had to be swept and garnished for so grand an occasion, and I’ve nearly
used myself up making things fine in his honour.” Her eyes filled with
tears. “It’s the first time he’s been away since the dear ‘Daddy’ left
us, and I had no idea four weeks could be such an age. I’m so excited
and happy over his coming that I can scarcely talk about it calmly. But
you know what a dear good son my ‘Robin Adair’ is to me, so you can make
allowances for a fond mother’s foolishness.”
It was some moments before Lloyd had an opportunity to make known her
errand, apologizing profusely for putting her to any exertion when she
was so tired.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” answered Mrs. Moore. “I think I know right
where to put my hand on the book in father’s room. I’ll step across the
hall and see.”
Left to herself Lloyd gave a shy glance around the room, remembering
the time when it had been a familiar playground, but now she had an
embarrassed sense of intruding. Many an hour she had spent romping in it
while Mom Beck and Dinah gossiped by the fire. They had had their
menagerie and lions’ den in that curtained alcove. Here on the hard-wood
floor between the chimney-corner and the window they had chalked the
ring for their marble games. She leaned over and examined the floor at
her feet with a smile. Those were undoubtedly the dents that their
top-spinning had left. Mom Beck had told them at the time, no amount of
polishing could ever wipe out such holes.
The little tin soldiers that used to stand guard on the window-sill
had given place to other things now. The rocking-horse that had carried
them such long journeys of adventure together had been stabled for years
in the attic at The Locusts. College trophies and pennants hung on the
walls. A rifle and a shotgun stood in the corner where a wooden gun and
a toy sword used to stay. The low table and the picture books had given
place to a massive desk and rows on rows of heavy volumes bound in
leather.
Then she recognized several things belonging to a later period. There
was the shaving-paper case she made him the day he bought his first
razor. She had been so proud of the monogram she burnt into the leather.
It looked decidedly amateurish to her now. On the leather couch among
its many cushions was the pillow she had embroidered in his fraternity
colours and sent to him while he was at college.
Between the front windows where the desk stood, and just above it,
ran four long rows of photographs set in narrow panels. Most of them
were group pictures, the first dating back to the time of her first
house-party, and ending with some that had been taken the week of
Eugenia’s wedding. It was like a serial story of all their good times,
and hastily changing her seat she leaned her elbows on the desk for
another look. But the nearer view revealed something that she had not
seen at the first glance. She was the central figure of every
group. It was her face that one noticed first, laughing back from every
picture.
Abashed at her discovery, she scuttled back to her former seat, but
not before her quick glance had showed her another photograph on the
desk, in a silver frame. It was the last one Miss Marks had taken of
her, in her commencement gown. She did not know that Rob had one of
them. She had not given it to him.
Mrs. Moore called out something to her from across the hall, and as
she turned to reply she faced still another picture of herself, this one
in an old-fashioned silver locket swinging from the side of the mirror.
It was the Princess Winsome with the dove. She was afraid to look any
further. She felt like an eavesdropper, for, the very walls were calling
out to her those words of Rob’s that she had been trying for weeks
to forget: “ All my life seems to have been a growing up for this one
thing --- to love you! “
She sprang up with the impulse to leave the room, to get away from
these telltale voices that she had no right to listen to. But just then
Mrs. Moore came back with the book.
“You can copy it here at the desk,” she said, laying out a sheet of
paper and Rob’s big heavy-handled pen. She did not sit down while Lloyd
wrote the few lines, but stood with her hand on the back of the chair
till she had finished. Then she said with an amused smile, “I want to
show you something funny, Lloyd. I came across it this morning while I
was looking over some old things of Rob’s. It’s your first piece of
needlework. You made it over here one rainy day under Mom Beck’s
instructions. It’s so long ago I suppose you’ve forgotten, but I
remember that Rob tried to make one too, and stuck his fingers so often
that he cried and gave it up, and you gave him yours to comfort him.”
Opening a box which she brought from some drawer, she took out a
sorry little pin-cushion. All puckered and drawn, its long straggling
stitches scarcely kept in place the cotton with which it was stuffed.
The faded blue silk was streaked and dirty as if it had been used for a
foot-ball at some stage of its existence, and the pins that formed the
crooked letter L had rusted in their places. But that it was accounted
something precious, one could see from the way in which it was tied and
wrapped and carefully put away in this box by itself.
It was a relief to Lloyd to find that Mrs. Moore did not attach any
significance to the fact that Rob thus treasured her old gift. She only
laughed and said he was like her in that regard. She couldn’t bear to
throw away anything connected with his childhood. Only that morning she
had come across the little blue shoes that he had learned to walk in,
and nearly cried over them, they recalled so plainly those happy days.
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