Annie Kilburn

After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They

had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on

from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them

home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn tacitly gave up the expectation of

getting her father away, though they both continued to say that they were

going to take passage as soon as the weather was settled in the spring.

At the date they had talked of for sailing he was lying in the Protestant

cemetery, and she was trying to gather herself together, and adjust her

life to his loss. This would have been easier with a younger person, for

she had been her father's pet so long, and then had taken care of his

helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was

like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained

with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to

receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he

was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the

end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom

and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully

cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother's death,

while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to

condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it

would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from

hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still

meant to go home.

"Why, my dear," said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty

years, "_this_ is home! You've lived in this apartment longer now

than the oldest inhabitant has lived in most American towns. What are you

talking about? Do you mean that you are going back to Washington?"

"Oh no. We were merely staying on in Washington from force of habit, after

father gave up practice. I think we shall go back to the old homestead,

where we used to spend our summers, ever since I can remember."

"And where is that?" the old lady asked, with the sharpness which people

believe must somehow be good for a broken spirit.

"It's in the interior of Massachusetts--you wouldn't know it: a place

called Hatboro'."

"No, I certainly shouldn't," said the old lady, with superiority. "Why

Hatboro', of all the ridiculous reasons?"