I think I felt her aloofness more keenly because, though I had barely seen her face, I was beginning to know her. The living-room, as in many of these remote plantations, occupied the middle of the house, running through from front to rear. There was no second story and all the other chambers opened on this side or that of this middle room which served also for a passage. The business of the day was done in it, or on the veranda, according to the season. It followed that, though my door was now kept shut, I heard her voice a dozen, nay, a score of times a day. In the morning I heard its full grave tones, mingling with the hurly-burly of business, giving orders, setting tasks, issuing laws to the plantation; later in the day I heard it lowered to the pitch of the afternoon stillness and the cooing of the innumerable pigeons that made the veranda their home. I heard her most clearly when she raised her voice to speak to Aunt Lyddy; and aware that there is hardly a call upon the patience more trying than that made by deafness, I was surprised by the kindness and self-control of one who in my case had shown herself so hard and so inhuman. “Confound her!” I thought more than once—the hours were long and dull, and I was often restless and in pain. “I wish I could see her, if it were only to rid myself of my impression of her. I don’t suppose she is good-looking. I had only a glimpse of her, and I was light-headed. When a man is in that state every nurse is a Venus.” And then, on the fourth day, I did see her. I heard some one approach my door and knock. I thought that it was Mammy Jacks and I cried “Come in!” But it was not Mammy Jacks. It was Madam Constantia at last. She came in, and stood a little within the doorway, looking down—not at me but at my feet. And if she had not been all that I had fancied her, and more, I might have had eyes to read something of shame in her face, and in the stiffness that did not deign to leave the threshold. She closed the door behind her. She closed it with care it seemed to me. “I cannot rise,” I said, taking careful stock of her, “honored as I am by your visit. Can I offer you a chair, Miss Wilmer?” “I do not need one,” she replied. She was laboring, I could see, under strong emotion, and was in no mood for compliments. She was in white as I had first seen her; and the quiet tones which I had learned to associate with her, agreed perfectly with the small head set on the neck as gracefully as a lily on the stem, with the wide low brow, the serious mouth, the firm chin. “I prefer to stand,” she continued—and still she did not raise her eyes—I wondered if they were black and hoped but could hardly believe that they were blue. “I shall not keep you long, sir.” “You are not keeping me,” I answered with irony. “I shall be here when you are gone, I fear, Miss Wilmer.”