When she turned to go downstairs, a folded newspaper on the floor
attracted her attention. It was near one of the trunks which she had
opened and must have fallen out. She picked it up, to replace it, but it
proved to be another paper dated a year later than the first one. There
was no marked paragraph, but she soon discovered the death notice of
"Abigail Winfield, nee Weatherby, aged twenty-two." She put it into
the trunk out of which she knew it must have fallen, and stood there,
thinking. Those faded letters, hidden under Aunt Jane's wedding gown,
were tempting her with their mute secret as never before. She hesitated,
took three steps toward the cedar chest, then fled ingloriously from the
field.
Whoever Charles Winfeld was, he was free to love and marry again.
Perhaps there had been an estrangement and it was he for whom Aunt
Jane was waiting, since sometimes, out of bitterness, the years distil
forgiveness. She wondered at the nature which was tender enough to keep
the wedding gown and the pathetic little treasures, brave enough to keep
the paper, with its evidence of falseness, and great enough to forgive.
Yet, what right had she to suppose Aunt Jane was waiting? Had she gone
abroad to seek him and win his recreant heart again? Or was Abigail
Weatherby her girlhood friend, who had married unhappily, and then died?
Somewhere in Aunt Jane's fifty-five years there was a romance, but,
after all, it was not her niece's business. "I'm an imaginative
goose," Ruth said to herself. "I'm asked to keep a light in the window,
presumably as an incipient lighthouse, and I've found some old clothes
and two old papers in the attic--that's all--and I've constructed a
tragedy."
She resolutely put the whole matter aside, as she sat in her room,
rocking pensively. Her own lamp had not been filled and was burning
dimly, so she put it out and sat in the darkness, listening to the rain.
She had not closed the shutters and did not care to lean out in the
storm, and so it was that, when the whistle of the ten o'clock train
sounded hoarsely, she saw the little glimmer of light from Miss
Ainslie's window, making a faint circle in the darkness.
Half an hour later, as before, it was taken away. The scent of lavender
and sweet clover clung to Miss Hathaway's linen, and, insensibly
soothed, Ruth went to sleep. After hours of dreamless slumber, she
thought she heard a voice calling her and telling her not to forget the
light. It was so real that she started to her feet, half expecting to
find some one standing beside her.
The rain had ceased, and two or three stars, like timid children, were
peeping at the world from behind the threatening cloud. It was that
mystical moment which no one may place--the turning of night to day. Far
down the hill, ghostly, but not forbidding, was Miss Ainslie's house,
the garden around it lying whitely beneath the dews of dawn, and up in
the attic window the light still shone, like unfounded hope in a woman's
soul, harking across distant seas of misunderstanding and gloom, with
its pitiful "All Hail!"