Rhoda said:  “Let us wait, father.”

When alone, she locked the letter against her heart, as to suck the secret meaning out of it.  Thinking over it was useless; except for this one thought:  how did her sister know she had grown very handsome?  Perhaps the housemaid had prattled.

CHAPTER XI

Dahlia, the perplexity to her sister’s heart, lay stretched at full length upon the sofa of a pleasantly furnished London drawing-room, sobbing to herself, with her handkerchief across her eyes.  She had cried passion out, and sobbed now for comfort.

She lay in her rich silken dress like the wreck of a joyful creature, while the large red Winter sun rounded to evening, and threw deep-coloured beams against the wall above her head.  They touched the nut-brown hair to vivid threads of fire:  but she lay faceless.  Utter languor and the dread of looking at her eyelids in the glass kept her prostrate.

So, the darkness closed her about; the sickly gas-lamps of the street showing her as a shrouded body.

A girl came in to spread the cloth for dinner, and went through her duties with the stolidity of the London lodging-house maidservant, poking a clogged fire to perdition, and repressing a songful spirit.

Dahlia knew well what was being done; she would have given much to have saved her nostrils from the smell of dinner; it was a great immediate evil to her sickened senses; but she had no energy to call out, nor will of any kind.  The odours floated to her, and passively she combated them.

At first she was nearly vanquished; the meat smelt so acrid, the potatoes so sour; each afflicting vegetable asserted itself peculiarly; and the bread, the salt even, on the wings of her morbid fancy, came steaming about her, subtle, penetrating, thick, and hateful, like the pressure of a cloud out of which disease is shot.

Such it seemed to her, till she could have shrieked; but only a few fresh tears started down her cheeks, and she lay enduring it.

Dead silence and stillness hung over the dinner-service, when the outer door below was opened, and a light foot sprang up the stairs.

There entered a young gentleman in evening dress, with a loose black wrapper drooping from his shoulders.

He looked on the table, and then glancing at the sofa, said: 

“Oh, there she is!” and went to the window and whistled.

After a minute of great patience, he turned his face back to the room again, and commenced tapping his foot on the carpet.

“Well?” he said, finding these indications of exemplary self-command unheeded.  His voice was equally powerless to provoke a sign of animation.  He now displaced his hat, and said, “Dahlia!”

She did not move.

“I am here to very little purpose, then,” he remarked.

A guttering fall of her bosom was perceptible.