Rose MacLeod

								

always watching for the diminution of sound, the veiling of sight
because she was old, and now she wondered whether the round golden notes
were what they had been fifty years ago. She stood a moment
thoughtfully, her hand now on the letters,--those tedious intruders upon
her leisure. Then, with an air of guilty escape, though there was no one
to see and judge, she left them lying there and stole softly out on the
veranda, where she sank into her friendly wicker chair, and looking upon
the world, smilingly felt it to be good. The sky was very bright, yet
not too bright for pleasure; clouds not meant for rain were blotting it
in feathery spaces. There was a sweet air stirring, and the birds,
though they were busy, said something about it from time to time in a
satisfactory way. Madam Fulton felt the rhythm and surge of it all, and
acquiesced in her own inactive part in it. Sometimes of late she hardly
knew how much of life was memory and how much the present brilliant call
of things. It was life, the thing she did not understand. Presently she
closed her eyes and sank, she thought, into a deeper reverie. These
excursions of hers were less like sleep, she always told herself, than a
kind of musing dream. At last she was learning what other old people had
meant when they explained, with a shamefaced air of knowing youth could
never understand, "I just lost myself." To lose one's battered and yet
still insistent self was now to be at peace.
When the forenoon was an hour or more along, she opened her eyes, aware
of some one looking at her. There he was, an old gentleman of a pleasant
aspect, heavy, with a thickness of curling white hair, blue eyes, and
that rosiness which is as the bloom upon the flower of good living. His
clothes were of the right cut, and he wore them with the ease of a man
who has always had the best to eat, to wear, to look at; for whom life
has been a well-organized scheme to turn out comfort. The old lady
stared at him with unwinking eyes, and the old gentleman smiled at her.
"Billy!" she cried at last, and gave him both her hands. "Billy Stark!"
They shook hands warmly and still looked each other in the eye. They had
not met for years, and neither liked to think what was in the other's
mind. But Madam Fulton, after they had sat down, challenged it.
"I'm an old woman, Billy." She wrinkled up her eyes in a delightful way
she had. "Don't you think that's funny?"
Billy with difficulty crossed one leg over the other, helping it with a
plump hand.
"You're precisely what you always were."
His round, comfortable voice at once put her where she liked to be, in
the field of an unconsidered intercourse with man. Electra, she knew,
was too much with her, but she had forgotten how invigorating these
brisk yet kindly breezes were, from the other planets. "That's what I
came over to see about," Billy was saying, with a rakish eye. "I needn't
have taken the trouble. You're as little changed as that syringa bush."