She stared at him.
"Grandmamma is waiting. She has been waiting nineteen years. She is blind, and she is very old, and she has a great deal to say to you, and I think she would like to say it before she dies." He smiled, a little crookedly. "And I should like to have you at the table. I have never had my mother at the table. I understand there is a place."
"There is not a place for me in that house, my dear."
"There is," he said, "if I make one."
It was growing dark when they left, and the lamps were being lit along the Cobb. Eleanor stood on the doorstep in her white shawl, and held Clara by both hands.
"My son tells me that you are the person who found my letter."
"I only noticed the postmark, ma'am."
"Yes. He said that, too. He said you noticed it was honest." She looked searchingly into Clara's face with her son's grey eyes. "I think that is a rare gift, my dear. I think it is the rarest gift of all."
"I only wish I had found it sooner."
"Do not wish that." The older woman's hands tightened. "Everything has come at the right time. I think you may find that is true of more things than you suppose."
She kissed Clara on the cheek, quickly, as a mother does, and went in to find her bonnet. And Clara stood on the step with her hand to her face and did not dare to look at the man who stood beside her, because she knew exactly what she would see there, and she did not know what she would do about it.
They brought Eleanor home to Dunmere Court on the fourth of June.
Clara was not present at the meeting between the two women, which was in the room of clocks, and which lasted until after dinner. She heard only, afterward, from Mrs. Grice, who had been passing the door, that there had been a good deal of crying, and a good deal of silence, and then, quite suddenly, the sound of two old voices, one thin and dry and one soft and low, talking at the same time about the best way of managing a nursery garden.
She was in the study. She had gone back to it the moment they arrived, with the feeling of a person who has been out of doors too long and is relieved to come in to a familiar fireside. It was the only place in the house where she knew exactly what to do. She sat at the great black desk with the lamp lit and the rain on the window, and sorted letters.
She had told herself it was finished. The task was done, the papers were found, the Viscount had his mother. There was nothing left that a secretary could usefully do except to finish the catalogue, which would take another month, and to find, in the course of that month, a new situation.