Dom Paradis’s cake, as modified by Rosamond of Roseborough and twentieth century dietetic caution, came from the oven a golden brown and snowy white success. Its odour was unique and delectable. Its weight was light as a puff. Rosamond surveyed it with a pride almost equal to that which must have extended the cheeks and bosom of its sybaritic inventor, Lallia y Poptu de Sillihofo Sanza, Countess of Mountjoye, when she first saw the glory she had evolved to deck the inner circles of her beloved. She sniffed it in long-drawn delight.

“Mum-mum—ooh-h! No wonder he ate himself to death for love of you, Contessa! I wonder if Dom Jack, the Prince of Roseborough, is fat?”

She dropped herself into Amanda’s apron again and set about preparing the icing. Countess Lallia had called it:

A stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a pearle but lyke to a paste wych dydde covere my cake about lyke a napkyn, as it were a mysterie.

“I think my icing will be nicer than yours, Contessa—without all that oriental sweetmeat chopped fine and beaten into it. There will be less anticipatory excitement about my cake and more of the calm satisfaction one feels when one knows what is coming next. You had so many mixed spices and sweets and flavours in your cake that Dom Paradis could not possibly tell from one bite what the next would taste like. There is a modern slang term that describes the culinary tactics you employed on the prince’s appetite—you ‘kept him guessing.’”

At first the whole conceit of the Countess of Mountjoye’s cake—“devysed and styrred first in the yeare 1715,” and now reproduced in almost identical mixture from the old recipe—had seemed to her deliciously humorous. She had chuckled and chattered over it to herself and extracted from it a larger degree of the essence of mirth than had come to her palate and nostrils in many weeks; for it cannot be denied that life at Villa Rose lacked brightness. A mansion full of antiques, with no human associates but servants of the same vintage, did not provide the kind of environment which spontaneously generates happiness in the heart of youth. Hibbert Mearely’s widow had been a prisoner in her own grandeur, daily acquainted with that state which, to the young, is worse than sharp grief, namely, boredom.

To-day, with the departure of His Friggets, and the new meeting with her young heart—which had taken place when she regarded herself in the Orleans mirror—a joy had awakened within her like the return of her girlhood. So vivid a joy it was, so brave and confident, that it had sent her forth singing salutations to herself, as if she believed the whole sun-filled, rose-scented earth were calling to her in that syren phrase, “Good-morning, Rosamond!”

How swiftly joy had unfolded hope! And how naturally, inevitably, both had promised love! Permeated with them, she had defied Villa Rose and its antiquities to hold her spirit twenty-four hours longer. Lo, a day was given her—a Wonderful Day. In it she might recapture her lost heritage—romance.

Now, while she beat white of egg and powdered sugar together to make the fundamental paste of the icing for the Paradis cake, an indefinable sense of sorrow descended upon her. Thought lost its elasticity of hope—it lagged and drooped. A lassitude crept over her whole person. Her eyelids felt hot and heavy. There was a pressure on her head that kept it from tossing in the air after its wonted fashion like a proud hollyhock.

“Everything is going wrong,” she whispered. “I have a presentiment of it—just as if some dreadfully unhappy thing had taken place and I was about to hear of it.” A tear fell, hit the rim of the soup plate in which she was beating the icing, and, luckily, rolled off instead of in. Both eyes filled again. She wiped them on the back of her arm, and, by this mournful gesture, sent a trail of icing across the wall from the fork in her hand.

“I never felt so sad in all my life,” was her inward admission, as she set about filling the cake with the cooked concoction of chopped figs, nuts, raisins, and candied fruit that made two inches of lusciousness between the layers. This fruity mixture, further complicated with the oriental “sweets and spyces” of her period, Countess Lallia had poured into the centre of the original cake and baked the whole together. In Rosamond’s day, fortunately for the more nervous digestive apparatus of current humanity, wisdom has reduced weightiness in cookery—hence the layer cake.

She proceeded to encase the whole—a large, imposing square of three layers—in the “stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a pearle.”

She went about it slowly and with downcast mien—sighing and sniffing—tears welling over her lids. When she had put the perfected achievement away in the pantry to await its modern Dom Paradis, she sank down in the kitchen rocker and let woe take its way with her. She thought of her high hopes of the morning and marvelled at the malevolent power of fate, which could change those hopes, at the noon hour, into vague, insidious griefs. Her body seemed to have lost its substance, to be let out into space. She felt vacant and psychic. “Something dreadful is going to happen,” she whimpered. “I feel my heart sinking right out of me.”

She wished that she were not alone. The big house, so silent and aloof, was oppressive. She questioned if it were safe for her to remain there, solitary, and decided that she would have Blake sleep in the house that night.

“I’d give anything right now to have His Friggets walk in and say ‘It’s a quarter to one, Mrs. Mearely. I persoom you’ll like your lunch.’ That reminds me,” she added, “I suppose it must be almost that time now.”

Unable to see the clock from where she sat she rose listlessly.

“Ten minutes past one? Why—no! It is the long hand that is at one. Surely it can’t be five minutes past two!”

She was still denying this when the bell rang from the tower by the river.

“Two o’clock! Two—and I haven’t had my lunch. Why, I—I’m starving!”

Discovery of the true cause of her sudden malady went far toward curing it. She ran to the larder, to see what cold fare she could find there, all ready to be devoured without delay in preparation. She thought, with compunction, of the faithful Friggets, always as punctual as time itself, who would never have let her fall into this pathos of the interior vacuum, had a greater grief not called them from her service.

She found so many dishes, that she might have wondered if His Friggets had not been secretly preparing for a party, except that she knew well their one extravagance. They would cook, when the spirit moved them. They were proud of their cooking; and they argued that what was uneaten could always be given to the clergyman, whose stipend was meagre, and what he did not devour he could pass on to the thirteen McGuires, who embodied Roseborough’s poor. It must be confessed not only that the vicar was tempted from spiritual yearnings, by the tasty abundance of His Friggets’ art, but that the thirteen McGuires were fattening like pigs. Their sleek looks mocked at sweet charity’s very name. Mrs. McGuire, herself, had given up her random profession of charwoman, because, as she said: “Sure an’ I’ve got too heavy to be bendin’ me waist, and up and down on me knees, and the loike.”

It occurred to Rosamond that His Friggets’ extravagance in this one direction was fortunate for her, to-day, since it not only provided her with lunch but with refreshments for her guests of the evening. There were two large trembling jellies, bowls of cream, a junket, a whole roasted chicken and a whole boiled one—[“I’ll turn the boiled one into a salad for to-night,” she thought]—cold ham, which had been boiled in a pot of Amanda’s own brew of currant wine, and half a dozen quart bottles of the parsnip wine, considered by Amanda, metaphorically speaking, as the diamond in her crown. All Roseborough admitted that Amanda Frigget’s parsnip wine was so good, so golden, and so lively, that it both looked and tasted “exactly like champagne, except that, instead of the regular champagne taste, it had the taste of parsnips.”

Rosamond appropriated the roast chicken and found bread and butter also for her needs. To these she added a tall glass of foamy milk. A crock filled with cookies was another pleasant discovery.

She pictured to herself, amid giggles, the expressions that would adorn the faces of Amanda and Jemima and all Roseborough if they could see the distinguished Hibbert Mearely’s widow perched on the end of the kitchen table eating with her fingers.

“I suppose, if I were a born lady, I’d starve because there’s no one here to set my lunch before me properly,” she thought, “well, there are advantages in having a pedigree of butter pats.”

As one second joint, followed by the other, was nipped all around neatly to the bone, and the milk followed the chicken fragments, Rosamond’s indefinable sorrow vanished. She hung Amanda’s apron on its hook, and ran upstairs to wash her face and hands and catch up a loosened curl or two.

She had decided to spend the afternoon hours in a nook she knew by the river, not a stone’s throw from the bell tower. It was the loveliest spot in the valley and, unseen, one might watch the three roads that crossed one another at the tower. She needed a parasol, and ignoring the four black ones—one with lavender flowers—and the two black and white ones—the latest with a white chiffon frill—which, in their appointed order, had screened her grieved countenance during the last four years—she selected a shot silk of a grass green, its brightness tempered with silver gray. As she set out from the house now, with its silken shade arched over her bright hair and bringing out every bit of life there was in her skin and her gown, even Mr. Albert Andrews could not have doubted that the young widow’s mourning days were over.

With her hand on the latch of her gate, she paused. Far down the road, just on the near side of the bridge, she perceived Blake returning with the obstreperous mare. Even while she looked, she saw Florence rear and dart off down the road to Poplars. There was a trotting on the gravel road immediately round the curve of Villa Rose’s line. In a moment the rider had reined in at the gate and uncovered in salute to her. “I hope he doesn’t think he has come to make a special call—he looks all dressed up—because I’m not going indoors again,” was her mental greeting. Aloud, she said, cordially, “Good afternoon, Judge Giffen.”