Discount Louis Vuitton It was late when Wilson reached Hilda’s apartment on this particular Decembe

It was late when Wilson reached Hilda’s apartment on this particular December afternoon, and he found her alone. She sent for fresh tea and made him comfortable, as she had such a knack of making people comfortable.
“How good you were to come back before Christmas! I quite dreaded the Holidays without you. You’ve helped me over a good many Christmases.” She smiled at him gayly.
“As if you needed me for that! But, at any rate, I needed YOU. How well you are looking, my dear, and how rested.”
He peered up at her from his low chair, balancing the tips of his long fingers together in a judicial manner which had grown on him with years.
Hilda laughed as she carefully poured his cream. “That means that I was looking very seedy at the end of the season, doesn’t it? Well, we must show wear at last, you know.”
Wilson took the cup gratefully. “Ah, no need to remind a man of seventy, who has just been home to find that he has survived all his contemporaries. I was most gently treated — as a sort of precious relic. But, do you know, it made me feel awkward to be hanging about still.”
“Seventy? Never mention it to me.” Hilda looked appreciatively at the Professor’s alert face, with so many kindly lines about the mouth and so many quizzical ones about the eyes. “You’ve got to hang about for me, you know. I can’t even let you go home again. You must stay put, now that I have you back. You’re the realest thing I have.”
Wilson chuckled. “Dear me, am I? Out of so many conquests and the spoils of conquered cities! You’ve really missed me? Well, then, I shall hang. Even if you have at last to put ME in the mummy-room with the others. You’ll visit me often, won’t you?”
“Every day in the calendar. Here, your cigarettes are in this drawer, where you left them.” She struck a match and lit one for him. “But you did, after all, enjoy being at home again?”
“Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live a thousand miles apart. But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the place. It was in Boston I lingered longest.”
“Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?”
“Often. I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times, I should think. Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I found that I still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if Bartley were there, somehow, and that at any moment one might hear his heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be up in his study.” The Professor looked reflectively into the grate. “I should really have liked to go up there. That was where I had my last long talk with him. But Mrs. Alexander never suggested it.”
“Why?”
Wilson was a little startled by her tone, and he turned his head so quickly that his cuff-link caught the string of his nose-glasses and pulled them awry. “Why? Why, dear me, I don’t know. She probably never thought of it.”
Hilda bit her lip. “I don’t know what made me say that. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on please, and tell me how it was.”
“Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were there. In a way, he really is there. She never lets him go. It’s the most beautiful and dignified sorrow I’ve ever known. It’s so beautiful that it has its compensations, I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation. It gives her a fixed star to steer by. She doesn’t drift. We sat there evening after evening in the quiet of that magically haunted room, and watched the sunset burn on the river, and felt him. Felt him with a difference, of course.”