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The loud talking in the office below and the occasional whooping of a crowd of mill hands going by made her draw her chair nearer and lay her fingers in her husband's palm. He smiled indulgently. "Don't be frightened, my dear. These men are not half so bad as they sound." Mrs. Field sat in the inner room of Ridgeley's office, waiting for the return of her husband with the team.
The loud talking in the office below and the occasional whooping of a crowd of mill-hands going by made her draw her chair nearer and lay her fingers in her husband's palm. He smiled indulgently. "Don't be frightened, my dear. These men are not half so bad as they sound." Mrs. Field sat in the inner room of Ridgeley's office, waiting for the return of her husband with the team.
They had no difficulty in finding the house, with its ominous lights, that had all night long burned out dim into the darkness. The door was open, and the bell brought a sweet, matronly woman to receive them. "We are Henry Ridgeley's mother and brother," said Barton. "Is he still alive?" The question indicated his utter hopelessness of his brother's condition.
"Come in this way, into the parlor," said the lady; and stepping out, "Mother," she called, "Mr. Ridgeley's mother has come. Please step this way." A moment later, a tall, elderly lady, sad-faced as was her daughter, and much agitated, entered the room. "My mother," said the younger lady. "I am Mrs. Hitchcock." "Your son " said the elder lady. "Take me to him at once, I pray you! Let me see him!
Julia could not remain in the house; she could not remain anywhere; and as the morning deepened, she took a sudden resolution and ordered Prince to be saddled at once. "Mother," said she, "I have the whole of this long, long day. I must gallop off through the woods, around to Wilder's. I haven't been there since last fall; and then I will come around by Mrs. Ridgeley's and tell her, and so home.
She was not sure that was quite the way that Browning had put it, and she thought she would like to be sure she could almost see herself saying it to Christopher. So she went into her husband's room to get the book. Ridgeley's books were on the shelf above his desk.
In the afternoon of the next day, the ladies drove to Mrs. Ridgeley's. The elders embraced cordially. One was thinking of the boy who had died, and of him who had gone so sadly away; the other of her agony at a supposed loss, and her great joy at the recovery. Julia took one of Mrs. Ridgeley's thin, toil-hardened hands in her two, rosy and dimpled, and kissed it, and shed tears over it.
Ridgeley's judgment as to the relative qualities of two or three pieces of ladies' fabrics, carelessly saying that she was choosing for Julia, who was quite undecided. Mrs. Ridgeley thought Miss Markham was quite right to defer the matter to her mother's judgment, and feared that her own ignorance of goods of that quality would not enable her to aid Mrs. Markham. Mrs.
She opened at the right page, and stood reading an incongruous figure amid Ridgeley's masculine belongings in her sheer negligee of faint blue. She closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and was moving away, when her eyes were caught by two words "For Anne," at the top of a sheet of paper which lay on Ridgeley's desk.
The entire page was filled with Ridgeley's neat professional script, and in a flash the gesture which he had made the night before returned to her, as if he were trying to hide something from her gaze. She bent and read.... Oh, was this the way he had spent the hours of the night? Searching for words which might comfort her, might clear away her doubts, might bring hope to her heart?
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