Lavender and Old Lace

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!"