I could care. How I wish I had never learnt it! How I wish he had never come back!"
It was above all in the afternoons – the dull, early dark, autumn afternoons – which for some weeks had been enlivened by the expectation, sure two or three times a week to be fulfilled, of Major Graham's "dropping in" – that the aching pain, the weary longing, grew so bad as to be well-nigh intolerable.
"How shall I bear it?" said poor Anne to herself sometimes; "it is so wrong, so unwomanly! So selfish, too, when I think of my children. How much I have to be thankful for – why should I ruin my life by crying for the one thing that is not for me? It is worse, far worse than if he had died; had I known that he had loved me, I could have borne his death, it seems to me."
She was sitting alone one afternoon about five weeks after Kenneth had left, thinking sadly over and over the same thoughts, when a tap at the door made her look up.
"Come in," she said, though the tap hardly sounded like that of her maid, and no one else was likely to come to the door of her own room where she happened to be. "Come in," and somewhat to her surprise the door half opened and old Ambrose's voice replied —
"If you please, ma'am – " then stopped and hesitated.
"Come in," she repeated with a touch of impatience. "What is it, Ambrose? Where is Seton?"
"If you please, ma'am, I couldn't find her – that is to say," Ambrose went on nervously, "I didn't look for her. I thought, ma'am, I would rather tell you myself. You mustn't be startled, ma'am," and Anne at this looking up at the old man saw that he was pale and startled-looking himself, "but it's – it's Major Graham."
"Major Graham?" repeated Anne, and to herself her voice sounded almost like a scream. "What about him? Have you heard anything?"
"It's him, ma'am – him himself!" said Ambrose. "He's in the library. I'm a little afraid, ma'am, there may be something wrong – he looked so strange and he did not answer when I spoke to him. But he's in the library, ma'am."
Anne did not wait to hear more. She rushed past Ambrose, across the landing, and down the two flights of steps which led to the library – a half-way house room, between the ground-floor and the drawing-room – almost before his voice had stopped. At the door she hesitated a moment, and in that moment all sorts of wild suppositions flashed across her brain. What was it? What was she going to hear? Had Kenneth turned back half-way out to India for her sake? Had some trouble befallen him, in which he had come to seek her sympathy? What could it be? and her heart beating so as almost to suffocate her, she opened the door.
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