She sat down in her shadowy room before the deep fireplace; where there was
such comfort now, such loneliness. In early years at such hours she had like
to play. She resolved to get her a spinet. Yes; and she would have
myrtle-berry candles instead of tallow, and a slender-legged mahogany table
beside which to read again in the Spectator and "Tom Jones." As nearly as
she could she would bring back everything that she had been used to in her
childhood--was not all life still before her? If he were coming, it must be
soon, and she would know what had been keeping him--what it was that had
happened. She had walked to meet him so many times already. And the
heartless little gusts of wind, starting up among the leaves in the woods,
how often they had fooled her ear and left her white and trembling!
The negro boy who had been sent to town on other business and to fetch the
mail, soon afterwards knocked and entered. There was a letter from him--a
short one and a paper. She read the letter and could not believe her own
eyes, could not believe her own mind. Then she opened the paper and read the
announcement of it printed there": he was married.
That night in her bedroom--with the great clock measuring out life in the
corner--the red logs turning slowly to ashes--the crickets under the bricks
of the hearth singing of summer gone--that night, sitting by the
candle-stand, where his letter lay opened, in a nightgown white as white
samite, she loosened the folds of her heavy lustrous hair--wave upon
wave--until the edges that rippled over her forehead rippled down over her
knees. With the loosening of her hair somehow had come the loosening of her
tears. And with the loosening of her tears came the loosening of her hold
upon what she, until this night, had never acknowledged to herself--her love
for him, the belief that he had loved her.
The next morning the parson, standing a white, cold shepherd before his
chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text: "I shall go softly
all my years." While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last
moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out.
"Yes," she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she
alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were
whirled fiercely about her feet, "I shall go softly all my years."