Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/63

Rh at all. Now the mother was gone it sometimes seemed to Dorothea that she had not lived for these fifteen years—and that even the life before had been less life than a dream of it. She sighed.

"I'm old," she said, "and I'm growing silly."

She put her pen neatly in the inkstand tray: it was an old silver pen, and an old inkstand of Sèvres porcelain. Then she went out into the garden by the French window, muffled in jasmine, and found herself face to face with a stranger, a straight well-set-up man of forty or thereabouts, with iron-grey hair and a white moustache. Before his hand had time to reach the Panama hat she knew him, and her heart leaped up and sank sick and trembling. But she said:—

"To whom have I the pleasure—?"

The man caught her hands.

"Why, Dolly," he said, "don't you know me? I should have known you anywhere."

A rose-flush deepened on her face.

"It can't be Robert?"

"Can't it? And how are you, Dolly?