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Updated: June 6, 2025
She leaped up as the vivid memory of the night's happenings rushed upon her, and, seizing her dressing-gown, ran out into the passage and so to Violet's room. Very softly she turned the door-handle, and peeped in. The curtains were drawn, but the morning-breeze blew them inwards, admitting the full daylight. Violet was lying awake with her face to the door. "That you, Allegro?
Nobody, for more than fifty years, ever had "come to call," and yet, partly because the feigning of such a possibility seemed to connect her still with her fellows of the work-a-day world, and partly because the young master, her foster-brother, whom she deeply loved, had last been seen by her with this door-handle in his hand, she faithfully continued every day to begin her light tasks by rubbing it, and while so doing she would often call to mind the early spring twilight she had opened her eyes in so long ago, and heard creaking footsteps passing down the stairs; and then how she had heard the great bolt of the door withdrawn, and had sprung out of bed, and peering through her casement had seen him close it after him, and with his young brother steal away among the ghostly white pear-trees, never to return.
The door-handle felt icy to fingers already frozen with fright, but he stood firmly grasping it, ready to turn it noiselessly when he had quite made up his mind what to do. The first expedient that suggested itself with an overpowering sweetness of relief, was that of locking his door, going back to bed again, and pretending that he had heard nothing.
Grewgious's door-handle yielding to her touch, she went in, and saw her guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with a shaded lamp placed far from him on a table in a corner. Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room. He saw her, and he said, in an undertone: 'Good Heaven! Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning her embrace: 'My child, my child!
The strain, the suspense, the longing grew to be too much for her and occasioned a revulsion of feeling. She had let her hopes carry her too high. Suddenly the door-handle rattled and turned. Allie was brought to a stifling expectancy, motionless in the center of the room. Some one was outside at the door. Could it be Neale? It must be!
"I had taken hold of the door-handle meanwhile, intending to leave the room without reply; but I was panting with my run upstairs, and my exhaustion came to a climax in a violent fit of coughing, so bad that I could hardly stand.
When, therefore, Mark confirmed the report, and was led on, by degrees, to repeat Gilbert's own words, Sally rushed out into the kitchen with a vehemence which left half her apron hanging on the door-handle, torn off from top to bottom in her whirling flight, and announced the fact to her mother. Joe, who was present, immediately cried out, "O, Sally! now I may tell about Mark, mayn't I?"
So she put a wet towel to her tell-tale cheeks, and dried them by artistic dabs, avoiding friction, and came downstairs like a mouse, and turned the door-handle noiselessly, and glided into the sitting-room looking so transparent, conscious, and all on fire with beauty and animation, that even Edward was startled, and, in a whisper, bade his mother observe what a pretty girl she was: "Beats all the country girls in a canter."
Might it not be here that he would find a perfect realization of his boyish dreams, and in HER all that what nonsense he was thinking! Suddenly Herbert was startled by the sound of a light but hurried foot upon the wooden outer step of his second door, and the quick but ineffective turning of the door-handle. He started to his feet, his mind still filled with a vision of Cherry.
He was in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and neckties, or in the next with his shirts and pyjamas, or in the lowest of all with his suits. He was watching there, hidden away just behind the door-handle ready to spring. She pulled a funny old-fashioned face at Constantia, just as she used to in the old days when she was going to cry. "I can't open," she nearly wailed.
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