For a time, the last words she had heard that evening were ringing in her ears—­sombre words, uttered in a deep tone of melancholy, by a voice which commanded cadences that had often reached the minds and hearts of men and swayed them.  “Is that all—­all, Roberta?  Must I go away with that?”

She had sent him away, and her heart ached for him, for she could not doubt the depth and sincerity of his feeling for her.  Being a woman, with a warm and kindly nature, she was sad with the disquieting thought that anywhere under that starry sky was one whose spirit was heavy to-night because of her.  But—­there had been no help for it.  She knew now, beyond a doubt, that there had been no help.

CHAPTER XXI

PORTRAITS

Revelations were in order in these days.  Another of a quite different sort came to Roberta within the week.  On a morning when she knew Richard Kendrick to be in Eastman she consented to drive with Mrs. Stephen to make a call upon Mr. Matthew Kendrick, now at home and recovering satisfactorily from his fall, but still confined to his room.  With a basketful of splendid garden roses upon her arm she followed Rosamond into the great stone pile.

They seemed to have left the sunlight and the summer day itself outside as they sat waiting in the stiff and formal reception-room, which looked as if no woman’s hand or foot had touched it for a decade.  As they were conducted to Mr. Kendrick’s room upon the floor above they noted with observant eyes the cheerless character of every foot of the way—­lofty hall, sombre staircase, gloomy corridor.  Even Mr. Kendrick’s own room, filled though it was with costly furniture, its walls hung with portraits and heavy oil paintings, after the fashion of the rich man who wants his home comfortable and attractive but does not know how to make it so, was by no means homelike.

“This is good of you—­this is good of you,” the old man said happily, as they approached his couch.  He held out his hands to them, and when Roberta presented her roses, exclaimed over them like a pleased child, and sent his man hurrying about to find receptacles for them.  He lay looking from the flowers to the faces while he talked, as if he did not know which were the more refreshing to his eyes, weary of the surroundings to which they had been so long accustomed.

“These will be the first thing Dick will spy when he comes to-morrow,” he prophesied.  “I never saw a fellow so fond of roses.  The last time he was down he found time to tell me about somebody’s old garden up there in Eastman, where they have some kind of wonderful, old-fashioned rose with the sweetest fragrance he ever knew.  He had one in his coat; the sight of it took me back to my boyhood.  But he wasn’t all roses and gardens, not a bit of it!  I never thought to see him so absorbed in such a subject as the management of a business.  But he’s full of it—­he’s full of it!  You can’t imagine how it delights me.”