“But, Mrs. Bowater. …” I expostulated.
“No, no, miss; it was in a butt they drowned the sexton. Here you stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both ends.”
Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my landlady went off to the chemist’s to get me some physic; I could bear inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table, poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands round her knees.
“Mother told me you were in bed, ill,” she said. “I hope you are better.”
I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well again.
She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: “My! how you startled me!”
“Then it was you,” I managed to say.
“Oh, yes; it was me, it was me.” The words were uttered as if to herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at me. “I’m not telling,” she added softly.
Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. “But please do not suppose,” I began angrily, “that I am not my own mistress here. I have my own key—”
“Oh, yes, your own mistress,” she interrupted suavely, “but you see that’s just what I’m not. And the key! why, it’s just envy that’s gnawing at the roots. I’ve never, never in my life seen anything so queer.” She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. “What were you doing out there?”
A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through. “I went,” said I, “to be in the woods—to see the stars”; then added in a rather pompous voice, “only the southern and eastern constellations are visible from this poky little window.”
There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in. “I see; and you want them all. That’s odd, now,” she went on reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; “they have never attracted me very much—angels’ tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny Bowater was looking for the moon.”
She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of some old madrigal: “ ‘She enchants me.’ And if I had my little key, and my little secret door. … But never mind. ‘Telltale Tit, her tongue shall be slit.’ It’s safe with me. I’m no sneak. But you might like to know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I, for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons.”
The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark’s song when he slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the flames.
“Will you please remember,” I broke out peremptorily, “that neither myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs. Bowater is an excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please; and—and” (I seemed to be choking) “I am accustomed to take my meals alone.”
The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows—like the eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but that of their beauty. “There you are,” she said. “One talks like one human being to another, and I should have thought you’d be grateful for that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I’m not sorry for them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I don’t thrust myself on people—there’s no need. But still; I’m not telling.”
She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned the chimneypiece.
And I?—I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what did she do?
“Heavens!” she muttered scornfully, “I gave up snivelling when I was a baby.” Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed—“And there’s mother!”
When Mrs. Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.
“Dear, dear,” she said, leaning anxiously over me, “your poor cheeks are red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren’t put a nose outside their
