This Was Tomorrow Read Online Free Page B

familiar feeling.
    The silence of the house closed in on him again, as it were protectively, until with a little clink and rustle Hagar arrived with the tea-tray, remarking that Miss Sylvie had said to bring it in now. He found himself wishing that Sylvia had stayed to drink it with him, and raised the teapot to pour his own.
    “I’m to go over there for dinner,” he said, as Hagar reached the door.
    “Yassuh, she done tol’ me dat too,” said Hagar cheerfully as she went.
    “Oh, and Hagar—I’d like to have the room I always had—Grandfather Dabney’s.”
    “Yassuh, she done tol’ me—”
    “Told you to get it ready for me, I know!” He took the words out of her mouth with a smile, and waved her away.
    When he had drunk two cups of China tea and eaten three of Hagar’s fresh cookies, he rose, intending to look round the house before he washed and changed, and mounted the stairs. Turning to the left, he entered the large front bedroom which had been Great-grandmother Tibby’s when Sue was a girl—theroom where they had first hidden Sedgwick, wounded, under the bed, while Yankee soldiers searched the house for him, and Great-grandmother Tibby, sitting up in the bed above him in a becoming lace jacket, had stoically gone on eating her breakfast from a tray—the bed where, a lifetime later, he himself had been born.
    He went in with his quiet, loose step, and stood before the mantelpiece looking up at the portrait of Tibby’s Julian, which hung there. The likeness to himself was such that he might have been Julian’s own son—the long chin and large, humorous mouth, the wide-open, reflective grey eyes, the thick, brushed-looking dark hair with no wave in it. Guess I’m what they call a throw-back, Jeff concluded after a long scrutiny of the canvas. I wonder who Sylvia goes back to. Aunt Sue always said Aunt Felicity was the beauty in their day—how did she put it? The words came obediently from his memory: Her eyelashes were so dark and heavy they always seemed to make her lids a little weary — it gave her a sweet, sleepy look, Sue said. Sylvia had eyelashes out to here, but she looked anything but sleepy…. Please, he said confidentially to Sue, without speaking aloud, can’t you let me off this thing about Sylvia? Do I have to be in love with her till it hurts?
    He turned and left Tibby’s room and went on to the next one, which was above the garden and which had always been Sue’s since she and Bracken’s mother had shared it as girls. Glass and silver gleamed on the dressing-table. The white ruffled bed was complete to its counterpane and bolster. He wondered if her dresses still hung in the clothes closet, and knew that he could not bear to look or to ask. Again he had the unreasonable feeling that the room was not empty—was not, that is, bereft. She wasn’t gone from it—not for ever.
    Hagar came quietly out of the room across the passage behind him, and paused in the doorway.
    “You want I should put heh things away mo’?” she asked anxiously. “Like the perfume an’ such?”
    “No—don’t disturb it. I like it this way.”
    “Don’ seem like she could be gone.” Hagar glanced wistfully through the door.
    “We won’t be so lonesome,” he said gently, “if we leave it the way it is.”
    “Yassuh. I laid you out a clean shirt afteh travellin’. An’ I put yo’ things in the little bureau by the window.”
    “That’s fine, thanks.”
    But she lingered in the doorway as he passed her and entered his own room.
    “Don’ look like you aimed tostay long, suh—or is you got anotheh bag at the station still?”
    “Not this time, Hagar. But I’ll be back.”
    “Long time sence you been heah fo’ Christmas, suh.”
    “Well, that kind of depends on the folks in New York,” he said kindly. “We’ll see.”
    “Sho’ goin’ to be kinda quiet round heah at Christmas ef you don’ stay.” She went away, her head down.
    He closed the door on himself, and after a quick,