again as she had left him in that hideous room at the Mallorys', tall, anxious, grim.
"I'll never ask you to come back, so help me God."
When her bath was ready she undressed. No word had come from that quiet room along the hall. She dropped her clothing and stood in her single plain undergarment while Nora threw her worn dressing gown around her. Suddenly she felt Nora's cheek against hers.
"My poor lamb!" she said. "My poor thin little lamb."
She put her arms around Nora. For the first time since she entered the house she felt love and a welcome.
Later on she put on the same frock again—she had no other—and brushed her short hair. Her watch said five o'clock, and at any moment now her father would be coming in. She braced herself, for her hands were shaking. But when he finally arrived he did not come upstairs; she imagined that Rutherford had told him, and that in his library below he was considering the situation, turning it over, this way and that. The waiting was terrible. Nora had gone. She took to pacing the floor, to operting her door and listening, but there was nothing to break the dreadful hush of the house. It was not until she was ready to scream that James tapped and said her father wished to see her in the library. It was poor preparation for her; it placed her at a disadvantage. Perhaps he knew that; maybe that was why he had kept her waiting.
She had expected to find him hard and pompous. Always in her mind he had been unchangeable, florid, heavy, immactlately dressed, a little cold. Now she was shocked to find him perceptibly aged, his face no longer ruddy, his clothing hanging loose on him. He was an old man! But he had not softened with age; he was standing, erect and stern, behind the barrier of his great desk.
"Come in," he said. "And close the door."
She did so, turned and faced him again.
"First of all, I must ask the nature of this—visit. Am I to understand that it is temporary? Or permanent?"
She hesitated.
"I don't know, father."
