The Choir Invisible

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."