A Silent Singer

by Clara Morris

Old Myra’s Waiting

Was she mad? I do not know. I only know that she was old, oh! very old, and had known such sorrows as break the heart and blast the intellect of many of her sex. So old, so fragile—so poor—with a wit like polished steel and a tongue like an adder. I was her one friend in the world and was as helpless as herself. We each earned our own living—that was the one experience we had in common. Save for that, there was a whole world between us. She stood wavering and unstrung at one end of life—I stood quivering and tense at the other end. She had known it all, all, and only wished to sleep, to forget—I knew nothing, and only longed to learn, to feel, to know.

The first time I saw her she stood on the bank of the lake, a little, swaying, black-robed figure, facing a blinding gale. The wild wind tore her pitifully thin shawl from her shoulders and sent it whirling down the lonely street. I set my long, young legs in motion and ran it down, and returning, put it about her sharp, old shoulders.

She gave me one piercing glance from the blackest eyes I ever saw. Her dry, pale lips drew back across her rather long, narrow teeth in a sort of smile, and she said: “My dear, you are a wonder; few young people condescend to run like that, particularly for the old. I thank you!”

She turned her face again to the lake. Though I found it hard to keep my position, she somehow managed to maintain hers, frail as she was. I was puzzled—why was she standing there, so thinly clad? I hesitated a moment, then I said as respectfully as I could:

“Madame—could you not go into one of those houses, or home, perhaps, and let me wait here for your message or—or friend, and then come and tell you?”

She turned her sharp eyes upon my face, and exclaimed: “God bless my soul! the girl means a kindness to me!” and she laughed a shrill, thin peal of mocking laughter that made me hot with shame and anger too, and I turned away with a brief “I beg your pardon;” but she could be quick if she was old, and her claw-like hand was on my wrist in a moment, and her sharp voice reached me through the wind: “I can’t, my dear, I can’t leave now! You see my treasures are out there, and if they should be given up, I want to be at hand. Go home! my dear—go home, where people are not old and mad, and do not wait for the sea to give up their dead,” and turned again to face the gale, while I flew like the wind from her strange presence.

Some weeks passed before I saw her again, and then, as it happened, was able to do her a second small service. The day was wet and windy, the streets muddy. I was hurrying down Bank street and was about to cross an alley-way, which opens on that street, when I heard a little cry behind me, and there rolled past my feet a very neatly done up, small package, with a large seal on it in red wax. It stopped in the middle of the alley directly in front of an advancing dray-horse. I snatched it up and sprang across to the sidewalk, where I waited for the owner, who came hurrying across with anxious face and outstretched hands; and behold! there was my strange, old lady again.

She seized the package, and examining it carefully, she muttered, more to herself than to me: “I hope it’s safe, a fortune blowing about the muddy streets like that!”

My face must have been an expressive one; at all events she read it like a book, and went on rather sneeringly:

“Oh, I’m not mad; at least, not now! This does not belong to me; it would not be a fortune if it did; it’s lace—old, rare and very valuable! Had it been ruined? Oh, it makes me quite faint to think of such a chance! I am really very grateful to you, my child!”

She spoke her thanks so gracefully that I felt myself grow pink with pleasure.

We walked side by side a little way, when she said: “My dear, I’m not a stupid woman, but I can’t quite make you out. Your speech and bearing says one thing, but your being out so much, quite unattended, says another. Oh! I’ve seen you many times since that day at the lake. Then, your clothes—they are too good for poverty; but you wear the same things too often to have generous and well-to-do parents. No, I don’t quite understand.”

We were right at the door of the old “Academy” then, and I stopped, saying: “I go in here; there is a rehearsal; I am a member of the company.”

I never saw such fire as could leap into those fierce, old eyes of hers—at that moment they fairly blazed.

“Here, you!—you with that clean, honest, young face! For fifty years I’ve had a curse, hot and burning in my heart, for theatres and all connected with them!”

Then angrily shaking her forefinger at me, she cried:

“You run up your flag, girl!—your flag of red and black, of paint and dye!—that honest craft may know there’s a pirate in these waters!” and, dragging her veil across her face, she left me standing there, divided between the desire to laugh and the desire to cry. A pirate? I was such a harmless, well-meaning, little pirate that even had I shown the flag, and blackened my lashes and rouged my cheeks, I doubt if I should have created a very great panic in the Cleveland shipping—and so, at last, the laugh won; and between laughs I said aloud: “I am a pirate! I am a pirate!” And so a member of the company found me, and paused and looked me gravely over, and, wagging his head desperately, said: “It seems incredible, such meanness in one so young, but you will bear in mind I saw this myself—a girl of sixteen, who knows a good story, takes herself out into a cold, damp hall, and tells this story to herself, and laughs and laughs all to herself, and then wipes her mouth and goes in seriously and sadly to join her defrauded brother and sister artistes. Clara, I wouldn’t have believed it of you!”

I had to tell him what I was really laughing at.

“Good Lord!” he said, “that was old Mrs. Worden. Do you mean to tell me you don’t know her? She’s a terror, is old Myra! She used to carry this town in her pocket. She was young then, and rich, and they do say Myra was a beauty. Hard to believe that, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Her features are really perfect. Her eyes must have been very fine; her hair black, and her figure very graceful.”

“Perhaps,” he yawned, “but she has the sharpest tongue and the longest memory in Cleveland. How she does lash some of our public men! You know the rector of Christ Church, the party who abuses theatres so often? Well, one day there was a race between the ancient Myra and the long-winded Reverend. She was overhauling him fast, and he knew it. These doors stood open—theatre doors. He was between the devil and the deep sea, and—well, quite properly, he chose the deep sea, and slid in here, and behind that billboard. Had he only known it, he need not have gone behind that board for shelter, for nothing on earth could induce the ancient dame to enter the door of a theatre; so he would have been safe had he merely stepped inside. As soon as she had passed, he tried to slip out unnoticed, but I was on the spot, I am proud to say, when I was least wanted, and, lifting my hat, I informed him that if he wanted seats he would find the box-office at the head of the stairs. He glared at me, and then I offered to run up and get him a programme of the evening’s performance, but he snorted something about ‘mistaking the entrance,’ and got away. Well,” my companion added, with a self-satisfied look, “if there is anyone in town who has not heard of that chase and escape, it’s not my fault.”

“But why,” I asked, “does Mrs. Worden dislike theatres so greatly?”

“My dear girl,” replied my friend Lewis, “I just love to instill knowledge into your hungry, young mind, but fifty cents are always full fifty cents to me, and if I stand here stuffing you with valuable information, I shall be late to rehearsal, and fifty cents forfeit will be torn from my unwilling pocket-book. So en avant,” and we both turned our faces stageward.

The next day was very stormy and bitter cold. My mother insisted upon my wrapping her shawl about me as an extra protection, but I had not gone more than a block or two before I was in trouble. The wind tore at me, the small pins could not stand the strain, they gave way, open went the shawl. The wind caught it, and slapped my face with it, and flung it flapping noisily through the air. I grabbed for it, jumped up at it, waltzed around and tried to catch it; but truth to tell that shawl could be found most any place in the street except on my shoulders. While I was laboring like a ship in a high sea, I heard some one knocking on a window-pane, and just as I began thinking I should have to scud under bare poles for home, the knocking was repeated so very loudly that I looked up, and, to my astonishment, there stood Mrs. Worden! I was amazed, because I had supposed the house to be unoccupied. The lower part was so, but at the upper window she was standing and making signs for me to cross over to her. Still wrestling madly with the shawl, I plunged over. The old lady opened the front door, showing an empty and bare hall, and holding tightly to the door itself, to keep from being blown backward, she motioned with her head for me to come in. I obeyed, and stood leaning against the unfriendly-looking wall, trying to regain my breath. Mrs. Worden smiled sardonically at me, and remarked:

“I don’t think you will get to your precious rehearsal to-day at that rate of speed. I’ve been watching you prancing about with that shawl, and I’ve brought you down this.”

She held out to me a shawl-pin. As I took it, I found it was yet warm from the hand of its maker since it was formed of a stout darning needle with a ball of red sealing wax for a head. She had seen my trouble and had hastily made this shawl-pin especially for me. I was surprised beyond speech for a moment, and she mistook my silence, for she began to jeer.

“Oh, use it, use it! If you can keep that shawl about you it may save you from a sickness. Then you can hide the pin from the sight of those lords and ladies at your great, fine theatre. They are so artistic, I fear its roughness and lack of finish might jar upon them.”

But I shook my head, and, smiling broadly at her, I said:

“It’s no use, Mrs. Worden, you can never frighten me again. I know you now, and you are good and kind.”

A sort of wonder came upon her: “Good God!” she cried. “You must be madder than I am!” then she turned her eyes to the rough, gray lake spreading far before us, and on her face there grew the look it wore the first time I saw her. She spoke out quite distinctly, but apparently not to me:

“I wonder if you hear?” she said. “I wonder? You used to call me good and kind, aye, and dear, but that’s five and forty years ago, a weary time my prettys! Perhaps the sign is coming soon—”

I stood a moment, then I laid my hand gently on her arm and said: “See, now, how safe the shawl is; I thank you very much, and I shall get to the rehearsal in time, after all.” She looked a bit bewildered for a moment, then she asked: “Shall you be long to-day?”

“Oh, no,” I answered, “I shall be through very early.”

“Then suppose you stop in here a bit and have a cup of coffee?”

I accepted the invitation eagerly, and, as I ran down the steps, she called to me: “You, girl, who won’t be frightened any more, I may be out when you come; see, here’s where you’ll find the key, and just go right up to the front room and wait for me.”

I nodded, and started again, but once more through the wind came her shrill call: “You, girl, don’t you touch the fire, if you have to wait; mind now, don’t touch it; I attend to that myself.”

The door slammed shut, and I was slammed down the windy street, but in considerable comfort, now that the thick shawl was fastened securely about me. I have seen—owned very handsome shawl pins since then—some double, with connecting chains of silver or of gold, and cunningly decorated by the goldsmith’s skill, but none ever gave me better service than did that darning needle with its head of wax, made beautiful in my eyes by the kindly thought that prompted its creation. I was really quite excited at the prospect of seeing her at home. She was an acquired taste. I had found her bitter at first, but now there was a faint hint of sweetness rising above the bitterness, and I liked it. I hurried to keep my appointment, and as I approached I was struck by the resemblance the house bore to the woman who lived in it. Both were so old, so gaunt, so lonely, and, above all, so frail. Surely, I thought, that trembling, old, frame shell of a house cannot be safe in any great off-lake gale. And when I first entered it and mounted its sagging, old stairs I was really frightened when it jarred at every quick movement and shook in each blast of wind.

Mrs. Worden was out when I arrived, and so I entered gladly the front room she had indicated, for, silly as it sounds, I must admit I am, and always have been, afraid of an empty house. I went in and closed the door.

Now, the French say, when colors do not agree ‘that they swear at each other,’ but never, surely, did inanimate things swell to such a storm of profanity as did the furnishings of this room. The floor was bare, the boards were narrow and warped and hungry-looking. Guiltless of stain or paint, they had been scrubbed to a creamy whiteness, which somehow gave the whole floor a peculiarly frigid, unfriendly look. It had a Pharisaical air, as though it were thanking its maker “that it was not as other floors.” Then, exactly opposite the door, there hung upon the glaring, whitewashed wall, in a magnificent frame, a life-sized, full-length portrait in oil, of a charming girl of about ten years. The “swearing” here was almost audible. The windows, ill-fitting and rattling in their cases, looked out directly upon the lake. The bedstead had been a grand affair in its long-passed day, but now, stripped of all its luxurious hangings, it stretched its thin, old posts up, only to meet the skeleton of its former canopy, while the silken spread of patch-work, of a brain-destroying intricacy of pattern, was worn clear through in places, so that the cotton wadding showed plainly. As I turned slowly around, I found another great portrait. This time it was a boy who smiled happily at me from the canvas; such a handsome, manly little chap, for all his absurd dress. One only smiled with him, not at him. I was very much impressed, for I had only been in two houses where there were family portraits, and I knew they meant a great expenditure. And then, ignorant as I was of such matters, I felt sure these portraits were the work of some great artist, and I was right, for later on I learned they had been painted by the most famous artist of his time.

Two small tables, a bureau, a few chairs, all of the commonest, and a small corner cupboard, completed the furniture of this odd room. Oh, yes; I must not omit the screen, then a very unusual object, a tall, narrow, three-panelled screen, which played an important part in its owner’s daily life. And the fire! Thank Heaven, I thought, for one thing, that did not look cold. I think there was about one scant quart of fire, and, as I threw off my shawl, I started to put on some coal, when suddenly I remembered that injunction, ‘You girl! don’t touch the fire!’ and I stayed my hand, but when I looked into the box and saw there just four pieces of coal, and so suspiciously exact in size one to the other, and leaning at the end of the box a hammer, my heart melted with pity; I began to understand. With a sigh I left the fire, precious but inadequate, and turned to study the painted pair. The boy, swarthy, smiling, happy, won your love at once; but the girl’s blonde, young arrogance slightly repelled. The portrait, considered as a picture, was quite lovely. The dainty figure, in the soft, yellowish-pink gown, stood out well from the olives and dull greens of the brocaded curtain behind her. On the table lay her great hat, while just slipping from her shoulder was the black velvet pelisse which, by contrast, brought out so beautifully the milky whiteness of her childish neck. The features, the lift of the head, the thin, slightly shrewish, delicate lips were all wonderfully like Mrs. Worden. But the color scheme was wrong. This handsome, overbearing child was blonde as she could be, while the boy, with but one feature of her face, her piercing eyes, was surely darker than she had ever been. So while I stood before the girl and thought how clever had been the artist, who had painted the boy with his hand upon his dog’s head—while in the girl’s hand he had placed a broken necklace—in these bits of detail, I thought he has given his idea of their character, and just then I heard Mrs. Worden approaching.

Like many people who live much alone, she had the habit of talking to herself—she was talking then. I heard her say, “That’s fifteen years ago, you fool! yes, all of that. Now, what the devil did I do it for?”

I felt quite certain she was referring to the invitation she had given to me, and I shook with laughter. When she opened the door, her eyes were snapping viciously and her brows were brought together in an inky frown; only her hair was white, her brows were black as they had ever been, but when she saw me standing, my hands behind me, evidently studying the portrait, the frown unknit itself, her eyes softened, and when I asked: “Who are they, the handsome girl and the laughing, little man?” she answered proudly: “They are my treasures, my man-child Philip, and my Edith, gift-of-God; because of whom I have not cursed Him long ago and died.”

At the words, “my treasures,” I suddenly recalled her speech at the lake, and instinctively my eyes turned towards it. She caught the look, and, going to the window, she went on: “My treasures, precious beyond rubies, they lie out there now; I watch them and wait for the sign.”

Then, pointing with her long, bony finger, she said: “You see that dark line out there on the water; no, no, the darker, purplish one? That’s where they lie. Yes, yes, my prettys, I know, I know! but it’s weary waiting, dearies; weary, weary!”

Her voice died away so drearily that I felt the tears rising in my eyes. A movement of mine made her turn to me. She put her hand up and passed it across her brow and eyes once or twice, and then, quite naturally, she went on: “I was wondering, when I came in, what I asked you here for.”

I interrupted to say: “I think it was to give me pleasure.” “No,” she answered, “it wasn’t that. I know now. I thought I’d like to hear some one talk again.”

I felt a bit flattered at that, but she finished with: “I haven’t heard anyone talk at home since my parrot died.”

Down sat my vanity, flat. The old lady had taken off her bonnet, and, as she motioned me to a chair, she said, musingly: “I never can quite remember whether I learned to swear from the parrot, or the parrot learned from me.”

She heaved a sigh and proceeded to prepare the tray for our coffee. As she moved about she continued her remarks: “Yes, we did a fairish bit of swearing between us, Poll and I; her name, by the way, was not Poll, but Sally, and, of course, I suppose some one must have taught her to do it, but it was delicious to hear the ‘bloomin’’ cussing she would give to any one who called her Sarah. Yes, all things considered, there was in the past considerable profanity in this room.”

And I, glancing at the splendid frame against the whitewashed wall, recklessly made answer: “And it is not absolutely absent at this moment.”

Her bright, old eye glanced from wall to frame, then back to me, her quick comprehension making my unfinished thought her finished one in an instant. She wagged her head and said: “That’s not bad, you girl,” then, with somewhat unnerving loudness, she went on: “She’s young and green, oh! but upon my soul, she’s not a fool.” Then addressing me again: “So you know some French sayings, do you? Not many though, I think; but look, you, young ears are sharp, and you should have been here before the hangings of my bed fell to bits. They were of brocatelle and lined with silk, and they cursed that whitewashed wall so venomously, had you been here in the bed, you’d not have slept one wink, unless your soul’s already gray instead of white,” and she laughed that odd, stinging laughter that was so like the crackling of thin ice upon a wintry day.

While she had talked and laughed and nodded, she had prepared her coffee, and we seated ourselves at either side of the little table, she taking care to sit facing the tossing lake.

Oh, that tray! It really seemed as though the things thereon must come to blows, so fiercely did they contradict each other. The coffee pot of make and material precisely like those good “Bridgets” purchase for the use of honest “Patricks.” The knives and forks—they appeared a bit later—were of that brand which always makes you wish that you were dead, they make of life a thing so hideous. While cheek by jowl with these rough things stood a few pieces of old porcelain, deserving, each one of them, a satin-lined box to rest in. And to keep them in countenance, there were four spoons of silver, paper-thin, initials and dates quite worn away, and all a trifle bent and dented in spite of the owner’s care of them; while the linen, I could have cried over that eye-destroying mass of delicate darning. Truly, there were places in my napkin where the darning had itself been darned again. But the coffee, like the fire, which had been increased by the addition of one small cube of coal, was inadequate in quantity, but the quality? oh, well, it was perfection, that’s all; absolute perfection.

I tasted it and smiled, and sighed. She understood, and snapped her old eyes at me approvingly, and she tasted and sighed, and then she slowly said: “Whenever I drink good coffee I always rejoice that God created it. It would have been an infernal shame had it been invented by some fool man!”

I laughed aloud—I always did, I’m sorry to confess—whenever she swore, she did it in such an impersonal way, never, never in anger, never, even when she was busily engaged in flaying alive some victim of her memory and her tongue. She generally swore to herself, and nearly always when in a reflective mood. When I laughed, she gave me a glance and asked quickly: “What is it, eh? Did I swear? Well, don’t you do it, that’s all. But Lord! you won’t have to live fifteen or twenty years alone with a ‘cussing’ parrot, as I did. For some time after Sally died I used to say ‘damnation.’ Oh, I don’t say it now; don’t open your eyes any wider, you’ll meet with an accident. But, you see, for nearly twenty years that bird told me twice a day that her coffee was ‘too damnation hot,’ and after she was gone I had to say it now and then to break the silence.”

As she talked she fidgeted uneasily with her spoon and cup; at last she broke out with: “My dear, I asked you just to have coffee with me, but now—well, to tell you the truth—I am quite faint. I breakfast at half-past six, that I may have the strong morning light for my work, and somehow I feel a bit exhausted to-day, and—and I’d like my dinner now, if you can pardon an old woman’s offence against all conventionalities, and stay and dine with me!”

Could I have known, I would have taken the coffee only and denied my hunger; but I knew nothing, and cheerfully consented to dine with her. I wondered where her kitchen was, and, supposing she would be some time preparing the simplest meal, I looked about for something to help me pass away the time. There was no paper, and but one book in the room, a family bible that might have been bound in a pair of old boots—its leather was so browned with age, so worn, so scruffed it looked. I went over to take it up, when my hostess, with distinct satisfaction in her voice, announced, “Dinner!” All my life long my generally-absent appetite has been pursued like an “ignus fatuus” by those near to me, but this time my appetite met its match; old Myra’s saw mine and went it about four better. The knives and forks had now appeared, simply as a mockery, I believe. Lying on a plate were four biscuits, or, as we called them then, crackers. They belonged to that branch of the cracker family known as “soda”—soda crackers, and while I looked on in stupid wonder, she carefully opened a handsomely-cut, glass box, with a silver lid, which, beyond the shadow of a doubt, had been her powder-box in days gone by, and delicately lifted out four little, thin scraps of smoked beef—four crackers and those scraps of beef—no more, no less—and we fell to and “dined” upon them. But when I saw her trying not to eat too eagerly, I had a lump in my throat bigger than our whole dinner. No wonder her weight was less than a pound for each year of her weary life. I wished I could gather her up in my arms and kiss the fierceness out of her eyes and promise her fire enough for real comfort, and coffee, and food—real food—that would not make the promise of nourishment to the eye to break it to the stomach. My thoughts were broken by “You, girl! is there anything the matter with your dinner?”

“Nothing in the world,” I cried, “but I was not very hungry, and, in fact, I do want to get back to my coffee.”

“Well,” she answered, “I must say you eat fairer than ever Sally did, for, I give you my word, for years on end that parrot cheated me out of at least half a cracker every day of her life, and yet, my dear, when she died she was as thin as I am.”

When I was about leaving her, she said to me: “You, girl, I like you! You are queer. You are uneven, and you make me guess. You know more and you know less than most girls of your age, and, thank God, you don’t giggle! You may come again.” She paused and looked at me with a deprecating expression, and finished almost meekly: “That is, if you care to share your spare time with me.”

I told her, and I told her truly, how glad I should be to come. How glad I was to live in Lake street too, and so near to her, and then, rather shyly, I added: “I think, if you will let me, I will tell you my name, Mrs. Worden”—and I mentioned it.

She was looking out at the dreary lake again, and, without withdrawing her eyes, she made answer: “H’m’m! Clara, eh? Cla—ra, Claire—Clarice—that’s a fool name, Clarice? but Clara—that’s light, illustrious, clear, bright! My dear, I’m glad you are named Clara. It’s a good name. I hope it may fit you as well as mine has fitted me. My French mother meant to call me Marie, which is, you know, a form of Mary—‘Star of the Sea,’ and he who did the sprinkling and the crossing and the rest was deaf, and he named me Myra—‘she who weeps.’ Good God! Good God! Have I not been well named? ‘She who weeps.’ The tears are all gone from the eyes, now, and they are dry enough, but hot, my dearies—so very hot! Internal, cruel tears that ooze slowly, like drops of thin, old blood, still fall from my heart, my dearies, while I wait and wait. Aye, it was before the altar, and with the sign of the sacred cross, and the touch of the holy-water on my brow, that he baptized me ‘Myra’—‘she who weeps!’”

I stole out of the room, where well-bred hunger showed its teeth so plainly, and softly closed the door, leaving her in the gathering darkness, a ghost talking to other ghosts, from whom she was separated by the thinnest, frailest shell of mortality I ever saw.

And so we went our ways, and did the work that fell to us. Some nights I pranced cheerily about the stage in country dances, and made announcements anent that carriage that always seemed to be waiting for some one in the old plays, particularly the comedies. “My Lord, the carriage waits!” It is a famous line, a short one, I know, but powerful enough to produce temporary paralysis of the limbs and complete dumbness, for the moment, in strong and lusty youths and maidens. Well, I was on most friendly terms with that line, and some nights said nothing more, while on other nights I went on and played really first-class parts, that being the manner in which we used to work our way upward from the very bottom, and felt no shame in it either; but nous avons changés tout cela.

While I was thus bobbing up and down upon the restless waters of my profession, my strange “old lady,” who had grown to be my friend, was sitting “like a gray, old Fate, toiling, toiling, weaving” the fairy-like stitches that made whole again the torn or injured among rare and precious laces. Her knowledge of them was wonderful, her love for them almost tender. She would shake her head and croon over them, when they were, in her words, “badly hurt.” The day she came nearest to loving me was the day I said I thought laces were the poetry of a woman’s wardrobe. “Aye, aye,” she answered, “that’s a good word and well said, girl Clara. It’s strange that, without teaching or information, your keen instinct guides you to the real beauties of life as surely as the sense of smell guides a young hound on the trail. There’s nothing made by the hand of poverty that is so beautiful as lace; so delicate yet so strong. Ah! girl Clara, some day, may you see a bit of Venetian ‘point,’ ‘round point,’ but if you do, you’ll smash a commandment, mark my words!”

Laces were sent to her from distant cities, and the package I had caught up from under the horses’ feet came, as did many others, from the then greatest merchant of New York. She had received much work from the South, but the war deprived her of that. So she went on cutting her expenses down to meet her earnings, starving quite slowly and making her moan to no man.

One day I paid a long-promised, much-dreaded visit to a young friend of mine. We had made our first appearance in the ballet together, the same night, the same play, and she was still in the ballet. She was the young person who gave me the decorated fly-trap for a Christmas gift. Somehow that remarkable selection of a gift always seems to have had something to do with her remaining so many years the chief ornament of that ballet. I had gone with her from rehearsal to her boarding-house. Now, there are boarding-houses and boarding-houses, but this was just a boarding-house. The sadly experienced ones will understand exactly what I mean. The happy, inexperienced ones may just skip the sentence.

Rehearsal had been long, so we were late for dinner and we seated ourselves at the long, narrow, untidy, unfriendly-looking table, with heavy forebodings. Everything seemed to have been devoured by the boarders before us, except the pickles. They alone coldly and sourly faced us. But when the slatternly waitress came in, I asked myself why, oh, why had I come at all? A slattern with a cheerful face is hard to bear, but a slattern who sulks is more than even a boarder should be asked to endure. I saw my friend, whose name was Mary, quail as this fell creature looked insolently at her; but before our doom was sealed the landlady passed through the room. Now, Mary always said that had she been alone that incident would have passed for nothing, and that she would have dined on pickles and cold water, or not dined at all, but I was there, and Mrs. Bulkley knew of me, and being stricken for the moment with madness, saw in me a possible boarder, therefore she paused and greeted me, and rather unnecessarily explained that the dinner was all gone, but added that she reckoned they could scrape something together for us. And Mary rather ungratefully whispered, “she was used to living on scrapings now.” While we waited, the sulky slattern, regardless of our presence, proceeded with her duties, snatching everything from the table, except the shame-faced cover and the pickles.

Presently Mrs. Bulkley appeared, and our dinner materialized in the form of liver and bacon and warmed potatoes, a vulgar dish, but, being freshly cooked, a welcome one to two tired and hungry girls. Had it not been for the table-cover we might have been quite happy, but the sins of the boarders against it had been many, and as they had not yet been washed away, they were not pleasant to look upon.

Just as we were being served, Mary remarked that she had “seen that awful, old Mrs. Worden giving a gentleman fits in the street that morning, and that two other gentlemen were waiting for him, and they had laughed at him,” and she ended by asking me “had I ever seen her?”

“Oh, yes,” I answered, “I saw her in her room yesterday.”

“What?” cried Mrs. Bulkley, dropping the spoon noisily from her hand. “What’s that? You saw Mrs. Worden in her room, her own room where she lives? Oh, nonsense, you don’t mean our Mrs. Worden! She hasn’t had a soul inside that room since old poll Sal died.”

I explained that my Mrs. Worden was “Myra,” owner of Sally, living at number so-and-so Lake street, mender of laces, etc., and then Mrs. Bulkley dropped herself, a friendly chair catching her; then she said: “Well, I’m dummed!” Then she took off her spectacles and wiped them on a corner of the table-cover, which made them worse, as I knew it would, and she took them off again and wiped them on a grimy handkerchief, and put them on, and looked hard at me and said: “She had you in her room, and you a theatre-girl? Well, then, she’s breaking up at last. Well! Well!”

She leaned her head upon her ugly, old hand, and I asked:

“Do you know her personally?”

“Do I know her!” she snapped out at me. “Don’t she come here every once in a while? and sometimes she takes tea with me!”

“Yes,” faintly murmured Mary, “and when she comes, a clean cloth goes on the table, and every boarder in the house who has ‘a past,’ keeps in his or her own room.”

I smiled comprehendingly, while Mrs. Bulkley went on: “Do I know her? good Lord! haven’t I known her since I was a green girl in my early ’teens?”

I was startled. Looking at her foxy, false front, her steel-bowed spectacles, her leathery skin, and the small framed platter she wore on her chest as a breast-pin, it was so hard to believe she had ever had any ‘’teens’ at all!

“Yes,” she went on, “I know her, as my mother before me did. She worked for Mrs. Worden for more than eighteen years, and now she’s breaking up. Here, Hannah, make me some tea! You, oh, well, yes—you may make enough for us three, and bring it here. I feel all tuckered out.”

And the old body did look worried and anxious. I was surprised, and I was grateful for her interest in Mrs. Worden, for whom I now had a real affection as well as a great pity.

“Oh, Mrs. Bulkley!” I cried, “don’t be uneasy; Mrs. Worden seems quite as well as usual. She works as hard as ever, too, and she is very kind to me.”

“There!” exclaimed Mrs. Bulkley, “that settles it! Myra Worden kind to anyone in her eighty-third year? She’s breaking; she’ll get the sign she’s been waiting for so long pretty soon, I reckon, poor thing!”

I simply could not help putting the question: “Do you know, Mrs. Bulkley, why Mrs. Worden hates theatres so bitterly?”

“Do I know, my Suz!—Oh, here’s the tea, and glad I am for it!”

The tea was good, and I saw by the gratified astonishment of Mary’s face that it was a treat. When the “Busy B” (as Mrs. Bulkley was generally called behind her back) had had her first cup, as a pick-me-up—a sort of green-tea cocktail—she felt better. She loosened her specs and let them slide well down her nose, so she could look at me over their tops; she planted her black alpaca elbow on the dingy table, and unlimbered, ready for conversation, while, for the first time in my life, I recognized these signs in a landlady without instantly taking flight. “Why,” she began, “it was like this: Right from the first every one said she’d throwed herself away when she took up with that great, big, pink-and-white chuckle-head, Phil Worden. But she was just plumb crazy in love with him. I suppose he must have cared a little for her at first, but mother always said he just married her out of vanity—like gals do sometimes—she being the biggest catch in town. Good looks, and money and family the hull thing! Well, anyway, he was a foolin’ her, or thought he was, before they was married a year. She knew of it in no time. Mother thought there’d be an awful rumpus, but Mrs. Worden shut herself up all afternoon alone, and walked and walked, but when supper-time come she just met him as kind and as sweet! Oh! Myra used to be sweet enough in them days, and she just talked and laughed, and he looked like a great school-boy expecting a good trouncing. Well, that blowed over, but Myra Worden was always on the watch, I reckon, after that. Mother used to say he was, somehow, afraid of her. She loved books—good Lord! the books she had; lots of ’em writ in French, too; and she first off tried to talk of ’em to him, same as to visitors, and he didn’t know a thing about ’em. Then she tried to read them to him, and mother said she didn’t know which one she felt the sorriest for, him or her; him trying to keep awake, or her trying to hide her disappointment. Well, by-and-by, she gives it all up, and, if you’ll believe me, that educated, fine-minded woman just took to readin’ out loud to him a nasty, low-down paper—I can’t just call its name now, but all about cock-fights—oh, yes! they had dog-fights and cock-fights in my time, my dear—and ring fights, and horse-races, and he’d just drink it all in, every word. She was fond of music, and he couldn’t tell one tune from another, he said; but that was just an excuse, because he hated to have to sit and listen to decent music. Common fiddling suited him well enough. He was almost stupid in behavior or sulky-like in company—proper company; but if, by chance, he was left home at night and his wife was out, he’d carry on with the servants, and sing songs, and play tricks with the cards, and imitate things—pigs gruntin’ and corks poppin’, and that like, until you’d laugh to split. In that sort of way, mother used to say, she thought he felt afraid of his wife’s finding out his real disposition, and she—why, she just followed him about with them black eyes of hers, and fair worshipped him. She was nigh tickled to death when her girl baby came into the world; yellow-headed like him. She was only like him in color, however, for of all the domineerin’ little hectoring brats I ever saw! Well, as I was saying, Mrs. Worden was the law of this town then, and it was card parties and coach parties and sleigh parties and lake moonlight parties, accordin’ to the time a year, and dinners and suppers and ‘routs’—that’s what they called ’em then, I remember—and people used to come from other places and they’d stay a week at a time, and them weeks was Phil Worden’s picnics, his two-forty-on-a-plank days, I tell you. Now, I never see nobody so dead crazy about theatres as Miss Worden was. Whenever a company came here she had the first box, and every night of her life, unless she gave a ‘rout,’ she was in that old theatre. Yes, I know it, an alley now, and only a few low variety shows go there, and no women ever enters its doors, but then it was, my Suz! it just was a fine theatre. Well, Phil was fond of the show, too, and she was awful proud of that, and it was ‘my Philip is so fond of the play,’ and ‘Mr. Worden will be at the theatre whether or no—’ Poor soul! it was so seldom they liked the same things, but Lord! even then she was deceivin’ herself. He didn’t care for no play; he just went for them dances they used to have between the acts, and the slack wire performers and that like; but he knew every man and woman behind the scenes, and knocked about with them in the daytime, and I don’t mean no slurs against you two girls now, but in them days actors was a rather common lot. The men nearly all drank too much, and, what’s worse, some of the women did, too; and well, one crowd came here for a long stay, and Phil Worden was just cock of the walk with them, and before long there was talk about one special female. She wasn’t even a leadin’ actor among ’em, just a brazen hussy who put paint an inch thick on her cheeks and daubed her mouth with a dye thing they called ‘vinegar rouge,’ because it wouldn’t come off easy, and she was poorer than Job, and all at once she had beaver bonnets and velvet pelisses and feathers and long gloves and a muff big enough for a bass drum. And because the woman was drunk oftener and oftener, and in her cups was a noisy and quarrelsome jade who would fight her best friend, and talked everything right out, all Cleveland began to wink and nod and say Phil Worden. Well, of course, Myra must have suspected, but never one cross word did she give him, nor show him the frown mother said she had on pretty often them days when he was away. But, one day, in he comes, near supper-time—even Mrs. Worden took her dinner at two o’clock them times, and people said it was all airs to have dinner so sinful late. Well, in he comes, all bunged up, a sight to see! His eye was all swelled up, and there was blood smears on his face, and his lip was hurt. Mother happened to be right there when he came in, and she looked first thing at Mrs. Worden, and she said her eyes flashed fire. She stood right in her tracks, looking in her husband’s face, and her hands were shut tight, and at last she said, and her voice cut like a knife: ‘How did you get your hurt, Mr. Worden?’ and he looked away across the room and mumbled something about ‘sky-larking with a fellow who was drunk and hit harder than he knew,’ and she, as white as death and as cold as ice, said: ‘You lie, you coward! You lie! Not even a drunken man fights with his nails! A woman did that work for you—’ and she threw open the door and pointed for him to go, but in came the two children in their gowns, with the nurse behind, to tell them both good-night. Her arm fell like a log, and she made a spring and caught him by the shoulder and turned him so the young ones couldn’t see his face, and pushed him towards her dressin’-room and said all in one moment, ‘poor daddy! has got hurted, so mammy must tell you good-night alone this time,’ and when she kissed them the boy said, ‘Sall ’ou tiss him hurt, mammy?’ and she says: ‘God knows! God knows!’ and mother said she got away with the dresses she was carryin’ and only knows that Myra nursed him faithfully till he was able to face the world again, and for her pay, one week later he left her, to follow the third-rate actress, who beat him in her drunken frenzies—like the dog he was. He left a letter for her. My mother stood, shaking like a leaf with fright, but Mrs. Worden stood like a rock and read it all out loud: ‘How he was not her equal, how she had been too generous and too kind,’ and then mother said he quite worked up there, and blamed her hard for not flying out at him when he done wrong. He said he could have stood it better if she had abused him, but she held her tongue or only spoke gently to him, and at the very end that’s what he said, ‘You should have lashed me, I could have understood that, but your tongue was not sharp enough,’ and then she stopped, my mother said, and then she read that line again, ‘your tongue was not sharp enough,’ and then, says she, with blazing eyes and white lips, ‘By God! no other man shall make that complaint of me! I’ll sharpen my tongue like a serpent’s, and adder’s poison shall lurk under my lips!’ and then suddenly she began to laugh and laughed and laughed, and while we all went a running for doctors, she laughed her way into the fever that came nigh to killin’ her.”

The tears were on my cheeks, and my tea was stone cold, when Mrs. Bulkley paused to refill her exhausted lungs and swallow another bracer. Mary had, meantime, been steadily eating, grinding with the regularity of a machine, swallowing with the satisfaction of a gourmet. She had devoured her own share of the meal and was now making predatory attacks upon certain portions belonging by rights to me, and I, believing that the “Busy B” was only getting her second wind and would start again directly, told her in a whisper to go ahead and eat it all, an arrangement satisfactory to us both, since I preferred Mrs. Worden’s story to eating, and Mary preferred eating to any story of any woman alive or dead. Mrs. Bulkley was about to resume her narrative, when she paused to shout an order to the cook in the kitchen “not to use none of that good butter in no cooking out there,” and I actually felt my flesh creep. It was the double shock that told upon the nerves. There was first that awful attack upon poor Lindley Murray, pounding him with negatives, then there were the rending possibilities connected with the butter that would be used in the cooking out there. And I was glad that I was not Mary. Mary, hearing that order, had simply let her eyebrows slide up her forehead a bit and then slide down again, while she went on eating. Mrs. Bulkley suddenly remarked: “I see you’re crying; well, well, I used to cry about Myra Worden myself, sometimes. But when you get old your tears come harder, like everything else, pretty nigh. I don’t know’s I exactly sense why you should cry for her losin’ that great hulk of a fellow, though.”

“Oh!” I cried, “her pride, think of that! To have been abandoned for some great woman, some rare beauty, would have been bad enough, but to have been cast aside for a gross and common thing that cursed and tore him like a beast, and all in the very face of the public! How could she bear it all, poor thing?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bulkley, “she done it somehow. But I must tell you a queer sort of thing about when she was sick—yet it jest shows you what dummed fools women be. Mrs. Worden had the most amazin’ head of hair I ever seen in my born days, as black as jet and hangin’ to a length I darsen’t name, for fear you’d think it lies, and thick! good mercy! Well, she was in for a long sickness, the doctor said, and no nurse could do anything with that mop of hern; and so they ups and cuts it off, and mother cryin’ like a baby when they done it. But when she found out herself what they had done to her—good Lord! she give a screech, and wrung her hands and sobbed: ‘It was the only thing that Philip ever loved about me. He called it his great, black mantle, and once he wound it round and round and round his strong, white throat, and now it’s gone; thanks to these meddlin’ fools, who don’t see that I can’t die!’ and she jest cursed every man and woman in the house, and raved over that hair of hern every hour when she was out of her head—when she was right-minded she never let on she noticed about it. Well, at last she got well, and straight she put on the widow’s weeds that she’s worn for five and fifty years. Poor soul! she held her head so high and looked so hard right into folks’s eyes, they darsen’t ask the questions nor make the remarks they’d like to. And she used to spend an awful lot of time and money on the poor—and she jest guarded them children as though they was chuck full of dimonds. But ’twas then she began to use the sharp edge of her tongue. She didn’t talk about folks, she never was one for slander, but the things she’d say to ’em was jest awful, and the worst of it all was, that she always told the truth. If she’d jest been abusive and have made up things outen whole cloth, nobody would ’a cared much; but what was it, now, that big lawyer said about her once? Let’s see, she had been giving him a hidin’ right before folks, and when she was done, he says, ‘The woman who is armed with sarcasm and truth is a woman whose tongue is sharp on both edges.’ Yes, them’s the words.

“But trouble jest follow’d right along after, yes, and pretty close after. ‘Mrs. Myra Worden,’ that’s what her cards said then; they used to say Mrs. Philip Worden—but when the black went on the ‘Philip’ came off. Mother said that she never heard her speak that name but jest once, after the time she stood laughin’ like mad over his last letter. Some one told Mrs. Worden that some one else had said that ‘she had a tongue like a serpent’s,’ and mother says her eyes give a flash and she throw’d up her head and she said almost wild-like: ‘I swore me an oath and I’m keepin’ it. You should have waited; my nails are long now, and sharp; already I have a serpent’s tongue. I might yet learn to cuff, and curse and tear you with the rest! Ah! you should have waited, Philip!’ My Suz! then came the trouble. Didn’t the biggest man, most, we had in town up and blow out his miserable, dishonest, old brains, because he had first lost his own money, and then had thrown away a hull lot of Myra Worden’s after it—expectin’ to get both back, he said. It was an awful loss. She didn’t say anythin’, hardly, but she shook her head a bit, while she watched the young ones playing; she only cared for their sakes. Some one said to her, ‘Such a disgrace, I do wonder what his family will do?’ and she says so quiet-like: ‘Get a much larger monument than is usual, and see that it’s of whitest Carrara, I suppose. That’s what’s generally done in such cases.’

“Well, she give up livin’ in that house, and give up all the carriages but jest a family affair that the children could be sent about in, and came down to Lake Street. It was a pretty house, but Lord! not like her a bit. And if you’ll believe me, that girl, that Edith of hern, cut up more monkey-shines and was madder than a hornet about it. Little Phil thought it was fine; fact was, the little devil was in the lake about half his time, but nobody liked to tell, and everybody knew the dog would take care of him anyhow. They got along all right for a while, she living for the work she could do for the poor and for the love of them children, and they for lessons and fun. My Suz! she had ’em so they could jabber French all the time they was dressin’ and until lunch, and then at that meal that Dutch woman she had, great flat-faced, stupid thing, used to pitch in and make ’em eat that meal in Dutch, or German she call’d it—though I vum! I can’t see no difference between the two. And dancin’ lessons! and, O, Lord! I can’t remember half they were studyin’ at, and so their mother let ’em have lots of play too. So one day, she’d promised to take ’em to the circus at night, and they were sure the day would be a year long; and some one invited ’em to go out on the lake for a sail, and she ups and says, ‘no.’ Well, they was mad; but she was weather-wiser than any woman I ever see, and she said to ’em, ‘No, my dearies, it’s fair now, but it’s a treacherous fairness. I dare not let you go.’ Well, after sulkin’ a bit, they asked if they might go and spend the day at Auntie Anna’s? She wasn’t their true aunt, they jest called her that, and she was nothin’ but a slave to ’em, and spoiled ’em—well, don’t talk! ‘But,’ said their mother, ‘if you go there to take tea, you will not have time to dress for the circus!’ ‘Why, then, dress us now; we’ll be careful of our things, mammy,’ said Edith, ‘and then we’ll come right from tea, by our ownselves—oh! please, mammy, yes by our ownselves, and we’ll stand on the corner over there and wave our hands and handkerchers to you for a sign for you to come to us, and then we’ll all go on up town together.’ They were jest sot on that plan. They felt it would be so big for them to come alone, those few blocks, and then to stand on the corner and make signs for her to come to them, and seein’ as she had already cross’d them once, she consented, and right away they were dressed and started off under the servant’s care to their auntie’s house for the rest of the day. When they had kissed her good-by about a dozen times—for the way they loved her jest was a caution now, I tell you—little Phil runs back and he up and said, ‘Mammy, I’ll take care of Edie—she’s the biggest, but I’m the strongest, and I’m the nearest to a man, ain’t I? So, I’ll hold her hand all the way when we’re alone, mammy, and I won’t let anybody speak to her, ’till you come down to us,’ and she kissed him again, and called him, as she often did, her ‘man-child,’ and away he went after Edie. The next time she saw the poor, little things, Phil was a keepin’ his word.

“Mrs. Worden went on with her doin’s, whatever they was, and along couple hours later she sees the sky darkenin’. There had been a good many small boats out on the water, and she felt uneasy when she noticed ’twas getting dark. Everythin’ along the bank was different then to what it’s now, you know. Some of them long slopes was all green and right pretty to sit out on, and lots of people used to walk there and look at the lake and do their sparkin’, and sometimes people would crowd the bank to watch a wreck and shout and yell, if anyone was saved. Well, as I was sayin’, Mrs. Worden she goes to look out, when a girl comes screechin’ to her ‘that a boat had been capsized, and the folks that had gone out to save the upset people were now in danger from the wind that was blowin’, and there was crowds out there watchin’ already!’ Mrs. Worden wraps herself up in a cloak and goes out, too, to the bank. Lord! Lord! that storm! and the shortness of it. I had a sailor boardin’ here then—nasty, drunken brute he was, too—he said somethin’ about their having where he come from what was called a ‘black squall,’ and that that was one. Well, I don’t know nothin’ about black squalls, but I do know, and you know, and every one else as knows ‘Old Erie’ at all, knows there ain’t no lake on God’s earth that’s as treacherous or as lightenin’ quick in evil-doing, and when Mrs. Worden gets out there, the crowd was already cryin’ out, and wringin’ hands, and runnin’ up and down. And, sure enough, there right close in was a bit of a pleasure boat of some sort, and, oh, dear! I can’t tell you no rights or wrongs, I was there too, but when I seen them poor creatures hold out their arms towards us standin’ safe on solid ground, I jest sot right down on the bank, for my legs couldn’t hold me up. Then a rumor ran through the crowd that there was children on the boat, and one great groan went up, and Mrs. Worden says: ‘God pity some poor mother’s heart! my own children might have been there, for they begged to go out to-day, but I forbade it,’ and right behind her stopped a woman who had come up runnin’ like mad, and was movin’ her lips and not makin’ a single sound, and that woman was Aunt Anna. At that moment a vivid flash of color was seen on the deck, it was a girl’s pink dress; next instant the crowd groaned: ‘The children, oh! God! see the children! and they are holdin’ hands, they look this way!’ A man was standin’, holdin’ a pair of glasses to his eyes, and without a word Mrs. Worden put out her shakin’ hand and seized them, while the silent woman, with the ashen grey face, fell down upon her knees and bowed her head behind her. The instant the glass was at her eyes Mrs. Worden stopped shakin’. She stood solid as a rock and she jest said: ‘Oh! Mother of God!’ and there she stood, and it was only a moment or two after that, oh! well, there was awful screechin’ from the women and some groans from the men, and it was all over. I looked at her. She took the glass from her eyes, and holdin’ it in her hand a minute, she stood looking down at it, then she gave a kind of start-like, and she holds it out to the man, and she said slowly, each word kind of by itself, ‘I thank you, sir, it is a good glass,’ and she turned and walked a step or two, and then without a sound, fell all her length, upon the ground. They carried her to her home, but Aunt Anna was taken to another house and cared for, and there she told how she had not been strong enough to refuse them, when they had entreated, and the people who invited them were old friends of hers, and would, she knew, be very careful; but where she took on the worst, was when she told about how the dog had to be tied, to keep him from following them. The ladies feared he might jump into the water and get in the boat again and spoil their dresses; and he fought like mad to get loose, and howled and barked his voice clean away. And I haven’t no doubt but he’d a saved one of ’em, for he was that strong, and a regular water-dog, and he’d brought the boy out against his will more than once, when people had sent him after Phil just for fun. Well, Aunt Anna was afraid of her life to meet Mrs. Worden, but she needn’t have been, for she hardly noticed her when she did see her. The doctors that come that time didn’t like her doin’s at all. She never cried a minute. That’s the truth, and she had seen her own and only children go to the bottom of the lake hand in hand. People that went there cried; the help just cried buckets full, and she looked at ’em, and one day she said: ‘I wonder how they do it? I can’t!’ and the doctor, once he got kind of mad-like, and he says: ‘Bend, woman, bend, or you’re bound to break! Do you think you have the strength to bear this blow as you bore the other one?’ but she only answered calmly: ‘I am what I am! I did not make myself.’ When he left he felt all upsot and he was cross as a bear with a sore head, and he said when Aunt Anna came up to ask about her, ‘She will cry, or die, or go mad; and the last looks the likeliest to me,’ and off he went. The minister he tried what he could do. He was a pudgy, kind-hearted man, and he had young children of his own, and he tried to talk resignation and that sort of thing, and she jest said to him when he got good and through, ‘Has your house been made desolate to you in one hour?’ and he jest burst right out crying, and he says, ‘Ah! you poor woman, how can you bear it?’ and she jumped from her chair and lifted up her face, and beating on her breast with both her clinched fists, she almost screamed out: ‘Bear it? Bear it? Why I—’ she stopped right in a minute and she sat down and said, ‘You will pardon me, won’t you? But, see now, you have little ones, yours, your own blood in their veins, and you can imagine, can’t you, the hunger, the agony of hunger I suffer for a sight of my little ones’ faces? I could wait a thousand years if only I could see them then, but they’re out there!’ waving her hand toward the lake. ‘Never, never, shall I see them again!’ and he, poor, old man, he jest sobbed and said: ‘Never, till the sea gives up its dead!’ At them words she gave a great cry—that’s the way the minister put it—she gave a great cry and she said: ‘My God! My God! I had forgotten—when the sea gives up its dead, and His words stand firmer than the everlasting hills!’ She threw herself upon her knees, and holding up her hands she cried out loud, ‘Lord, thou hast sent my soul down into hell, but for Thy great words, will I praise Thee forever!’ She turned and kissed the minister’s hand and blessed him for reminding her. ‘They are truthful children, and have long memories,’ she said, ‘and when the sea gives up its dead, they will give the promised sign, and I will join them, and we will all go on together. So I will watch and wait, just watch and wait for my dear ones’ sign!’ And that was full fifty years ago, for I was but eighteen then, and Myra Worden has watched at that lake’s side faithful ever since; though from that day people have called her mad, and I suppose she is, poor soul.”

I bowed my head upon my hands; dully I heard Mrs. Bulkley going on about some bank’s failure, something about a fire that had followed close upon the failure, and the word ruin, many times repeated, but my real attention was fixed upon a picture that rose before me. I saw, as plainly as I ever saw anything in my life, a great, level plain, and far away against the angry sunset sky, a line of low unwooded hills encircled it. It was unspeakably dreary—no trees, no water, no rise and fall, dip or break in the monotonous, dead level of the ground. Far away to the left, in the growing darkness, I saw the towers and cupolas of a fair, white city, and from its distant gates a path was worn across the dismal plain—a path so faint, so narrow, it could only have been made by one lone traveler’s feet. At the very farthest end, and on either side, there were faint outlines as of fallen bodies, and there were broken urns, and jars, and some withered garlands; but for all its greater length, it was narrow, faint and bare. And while I looked, suddenly, at its opposite end, that nearest to the hills, there appeared the figure of that traveler whose weary feet had worn that piteous path. Behind her, the fair, white city; before her, the bleak and savage hills. The tall figure, in its sombre garments, seemed the very spirit of desolation. The face was turned away from me, but there was that in the figure which made my heart leap up in quick recognition, and then, so truly as you live, then I heard a voice, clear and distinct, but seemingly very, very far away, and it said: “I am Myra, ‘she who weeps!’”

I gave a start so violent that I turned my tea-cup completely over, and, putting it hastily to rights again, saw Mrs. Bulkley looking her grimy handkerchief over carefully to find a promising bit to rub her glasses with. Her false front was much awry, and her small eyes were red, and she was finishing, as she had begun, with the assertion that “Mrs. Worden was breaking up, no doubt of that, since she had taken up with a theatre-girl, of all people on the footstool, well! well!”

I thanked the “Busy B” for her tea and her information, and I greatly fear I proved an unsatisfactory confidant for Mary, who dearly loved plenty of “oh’s!” and “ah’s!” and “did you ever’s?” while she poured forth tales of the numbers of magnificent male creatures who madly pursued her through life, she always baffling them, however. By the way, she must have kept up her habit of baffling the magnificent ones, because she eventually married a baker with a veritable low-comedy name, by the side of which “Bowersocks,” would look grave and dignified.

The pain I felt in hearing Mrs. Worden coarsely and disrespectfully spoken of opened my eyes to the extent of the veneration and affection I had grown to feel for her. That creature in whom the world saw a desolate woman, whose haughty, old head was held high, and whose piercing, hawk’s eye spied out its weakness, but in whom I saw the wearily faithful, old watcher, by the restless lake, waiting through the long years, always “waiting for the sign.” To me, her sorrows had made her sacred.

I had never seen any creature who seemed so absolutely bloodless as did old Mrs. Worden, and no matter how often I might meet her, the moment my eye took in the waxen pallor of her face, I experienced an uncanny feeling of familiarity. I would ask myself, “Of whom does she remind me?” knowing all the time that I had never seen anyone who resembled her in the slightest degree.

But one day as she sat, as ever, facing the lake, with her eyes cast down upon her cup, the cold, dull light falling upon the clear-cut features of her wax-white face, turning it into a veritable mask of death, I looked steadily at the hollow of her temples—not the faintest pulsation there. I gazed steadily at her throat—not a pulse-beat could I see, though I knew my own full throat would throb and swell at times as though it had an independent existence. As I looked, I thought, if she should run a needle deep into her finger I believe nothing would follow its withdrawal, and so, like a flash, it leaped into my mind who she was like. The very counterpart of old King Duncan! He of the mighty tragedy—the victim of that woman who raved in her crime-haunted sleep; not of pity at his “taking off,” not of remorse, but only of that stupendous surprise: “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him!”

The good, old man with the wool-white locks, and the saintly soul housed in the parchment-like body—yes! like this he looked. Yet her dagger thrust had been followed by a rush of royal blood that not only “laced” all his followers and “pooled” about his body, but stained her hand with a stain too deep for an ocean’s waves to wash away.

Never since have I read or thought of Duncan without seeing Mrs. Worden’s features beneath the golden round of sovereignty. All the life, the strength, the spirit she had left, was gathered up into the fire of her eyes, and when the ashes of her lids covered their glow, her face was as the face of Duncan, dead. Were Mrs. Worden living now, she would probably be called a “mind reader.” Then many people declared her to be clairvoyant. Be that as it may, she had, beyond doubt, a wonderful power of reading or guessing other people’s thoughts, a power which added greatly to the terror with which she inspired some of her townsmen whose thoughts were not always of a quality or nature to invite close feminine inspection. As for myself, she had divined my thoughts, time and again, with a calm exactitude that filled me with awe; and that day, while I still gazed at her mask-like face, she raised her eyes, looked steadily into mine a moment, and in an even voice asked: “Well? Whom am I like? The Witch of Endor?” and, without a moment’s pause, obediently as a little child, I made answer: “No, ma’am, you are like King Duncan!”

A quick frown knit her black brows. Never since that far-away day of the giving of the shawl-pin, had she, by word or sign, hinted at her knowledge of my being an actress, and I saw the allusion to Macbeth was unwelcome to her. However, she quickly recovered from her annoyance, and, with her usual aptness, asked: “Do you find the likeness purely physical, or do I, like the old soldier king, ‘lag superfluous on the stage of life’?”

To which I gaily and gratefully replied: “At all events I shall not, like Mistress Macbeth, try to ‘push you from your stool’!”

And her answer, to my annoyance, was: “How—how—is she going to do it?”

She was thinking aloud, but I knew only too well that her question referred to me; and equally well I knew that a bad quarter of an hour was directly before me. Several times the old lady had declared that I was going to make my mark in the world, but she was greatly puzzled, very naturally, to know how I was to do it. She had, therefore, fallen into a way of analyzing my character, before my very face, with positively brutal frankness, and, so far, she had always failed to find out how I was to attain the success she foretold for me.

Really, it seemed a form of vivisection she subjected me to, and I squirmed in unpleasant anticipation when I heard that: “How—how is she going to do it?”

I had no suggestion to offer, so I drank my coffee silently. She studied my face a moment, and then she said: “Yes—yes, you will, I tell you! But, how! You are not aggressive enough to win by force! Oh, you can fight fast enough, flaring nostrils! but you will always fight on the defensive. You are clever, but you are not clever enough! Intellect isn’t going to win for you. How are you going to do it? Yet you are to dominate, to have power. I’ve seen it in the arch of your bared foot, in the unbeautiful square of your shoulders, in the tenacious grasp of your hand. If you had great beauty now—there, don’t redden that way: never blush above the eyes, it’s not becoming—you are all right; you’re straight, and fair, and wholesome. You have enough good looks for men to hang their lies upon, but you have not a world-conquering beauty. Deuce take me, girl, if I can make it!”

While she had been harrying me I had once turned my head to see why the room had darkened so noticeably, and saw a heavy fog was creeping in from the lake, and now that she had come to her “giving it up” place, she turned her eyes slowly toward their usual resting place, the lake, and a quick change came over her. She started a little, then her head drooped slowly until her chin rested on her hand. With unwinking eyes she stared straight ahead of her, while gradually the brightness all died out of them, a slightly distressed raising of her brows threw deep furrows across her forehead, her nostrils were pinched, her thin lips tight pressed, while over all her face grew a look only to be described by one word—a look of woe!

It wrung my heart! I looked and looked at her—the tears rose thick in my eyes, then slowly, slowly I seemed to understand, to know, what was grieving her. It was the surrounding fog, silently, steadily, blotting out everything between heaven and earth! Even her longing mother’s eyes could not pierce that soft density, could not distinguish the purplish, dark line that, to her belief, marked her darlings’ resting place out there in the great lake.

I bore it as long as I could, and then I leant across the tiny table, and, laying my warm hand upon her chill one, I said: “Dear Mrs. Worden, do not grieve, the fog often lifts at sunset. Then, perhaps, you may see the purple line before the night comes on!”

Her eyes came slowly back to mine, she smiled gratefully at me, and then all suddenly the fire flashed into them again. She rose to her feet, her head held high in her imperious way, and cried, triumphantly: “I have it now, girl! You have given me the clue! You will succeed by your power of sympathy! You will not fight the world, you will open your great heart to its sorrows, and the many-headed public will neither growl at nor tear you, but will come at your call, your friend and your defender. When you know you have succeeded, say once to yourself, ‘Old Myra saw, old Myra told me true.’”

Then with an indescribably tragic gesture she pressed one hand upon her breast and said: “She who weeps!” while her other hand fell softly upon my head, and she murmured, “Clear, Light, Illustrious!”

Her tone thrilled me, there was such sincerity, such intensity in it. I sat quite silent, but I drew her cold hand down and pressed my check against it, and that moment there came a heavy knocking on the lower front door. I sprang up, saying: “Let me go, Mrs. Worden, please!” and, without awaiting permission, went cautiously down the sagging stairs and found a man at the door with the usual sealed package for Mrs. Worden. When the signing for it was all over, I ran back, calling out joyously, “Lace! lace! Mrs. Worden—more lace! You will open it before I go, won’t you, so that I may see it?”

Mrs. Worden, meeting my request with, “You girl! When are you going to learn not to prance when you are pleased? Can’t you keep your joy out of your legs?” went, all the same, to the other table for scissors to cut the cord and seals at once; for she really enjoyed showing me her precious charges; and I eagerly watched her every movement. The note enclosed she laid aside with a scornful, “Humph! as if I didn’t know what to do without their telling me.”

Then she unrolled the inner tissue-paper. There were two pieces of lace within. One delicate, oh! as cobweb, I thought, as it lay there in its folds. The other heavier, and a mere scrap.

“Why,” said she, taking it up first, “why, this must be, is a bit of old Flanders cut-work, but what a scrap! Oh, yes! I see now, it belongs to some collector; it is simply an example of the brave, old work, and I see, girl Clara, it needs two, yes, three, little brides or braces—see where they are broken? I’ll have a time, now, to wait for thread to darken to anything like that tone.”

And she talked earnestly, almost happily on, about her little tricks and devices for staining threads, etc. Then she laid her hands upon the folded lace: “Ah, I think you’re going to have a treat now, this is—” the words died on her lips. From her throat came a sound, strange, startling, neither sob nor groan, and yet like unto both! She held a length of lace between her hands; she swayed slightly back and forth, and turning my frightened eyes upon her face, I thought: “Behold! a miracle!”

From somewhere, somehow, the weary, old heart had forced through her shrunken veins one wave of blood strong enough to mount to her face, where the pained color slowly grew until it burned into two bright spots high upon her cheeks. Those two fierce spots, glowing in the awful pallor of her face, to me were terrible. I ran to her and, throwing my arm about her, lowered her light body into the chair close to the table. Her haughty, old head was bent; one hand still clutched the lace. I did not know what to do, but it hurt me to the heart to see her bow her head. Timidly I laid my hand upon her shoulder. She looked up at me, and in a husky voice she said, with a glance at the lace: “I owned it once, yes, it was mine! I wore it while I was yet a happy bride!”

I shivered and turned away, while I mutely prayed that torturing color might fade from her face before I looked again. I pressed my forehead to the window, I could see nothing; no tree, no building loomed darkly through the fog; I could not even see the pavement below me. So far as sight went, there were but two living creatures in the world, and one of them longed to leave it!

I was so lonely and so sad, I turned back again. She sat there still, one hand moving back and forth over the lace. The spots were yet on her cheeks, but they were not so fiercely bright. I did not know her like that. I wish she would accuse me of “prancing,” or tell me I “sat down too quickly,” or “jumped up” when I rose. I wished she would snap at me—that her dear, old head would lift itself imperiously again. I had not spoken one word since she told me the lace had been hers, and so, still silent, I crossed back to her and sat down at her feet and, hesitatingly, I asked: “Dear Mrs. Worden, is the lace much injured?”

The words acted like magic upon her. In one moment she had the length of lace passing swiftly between her inquiring fingers, and an instant later she gave a cry of anger: “Oh! shame! just look at this—the cruel hurt! and the soil! Why, some vulgar, new, rich, money-flaunting creature owns this dear lace now! She is ignorant and coarse! Oh, I know, girl! Don’t you see? She has dragged this delicate web about on the bottom of her gown! Its beauty was lost in such a position. It was simply done to show the owner’s utter indifference to expense. I’d wager something that it has been sent, now, by some maid or companion to be repaired. Ah! I should have recognized it any way—but look you, here is the proof that it is mine!”

She held out to me a fold of the lace, and careful examination showed where a former tear had been exquisitely repaired. I nodded my head and she went on, her eyes fixed upon the old scar: “As if I could forget! He did that, my fair-haired giant—man without soul—therefore, husband without honor! But, truly, he was good to look upon!”

I moved restlessly; she took no notice; evidently I had ceased to exist for her: “Fickle, changeable as a child, unstable as water! But, he loved me for a little while. He loved me then, the night I wore this lace to the rout. It was falling full and deep about my bare shoulders, as they rose from the golden yellow of my gown that was brocaded with a scarlet flower. I wore some diamonds and stood with others in my hands, hesitating, when he came in—my Philip—and looked at me reflected in the glass, and, standing behind me, he said, in the great voice I loved: ‘Burn my body, but you are a handsome woman, Myra!’ and he kissed me on the shoulder. ’Twas like wine taken on a cold day; I felt it mounting to my brain! We were at Christmas-tide, and a bough of holly was hanging above the dressing table. He broke a bunch of its scarlet berries and dark, bright leaves, and, with a great jewel, fastened it here, in the lace at my bosom. His fingers were clumsy and the leaves were sharp as needles, and so my lace was torn—but what cared I? The sharp leaf-points wounded my neck, too, and drew more than one drop of blood, but had they come straight from the heart, I would still have worn the ornament his hand had placed. My Philip! so much I loved him—loved him! Bibber of wine and companion of harlots; fair, like a God, yet without soul; so, being soulless, why should he be cursed for riotously living in the sunlight, and for following in the train of the scarlet woman—with the laughter of fools ringing in his ears! The lace is here, the smooth, white shoulders are shrivelled and bent, the black crown of hair he loved is gone, he is gone, only the lace and my memory are left!”

I drew softly away from her. I felt as guilty in listening to her self-communing as I could have felt had I opened and read one of her letters. I took my cloak, and as I drew it on, I heard her low voice saying: “You said my tongue was not sharp enough, Philip; that was because I loved you! Her tongue was sharp, she cursed and flouted you, and stung and maddened, and tossed you a favor as a bone is tossed to a dog! She was not even beautiful, your frail one, but she knew well the ways that lead down to darkness and to death! She led, steeped in vice and reeling with wine, and you followed because you were without soul, my Philip!”

I crept out of the door and left the bowed, weary, old woman patiently examining the torn meshes of two webs. One her web of lace, the other her web of life. And as I stole through the chilly, gaunt, old house not one of its faint voices—and it had many—whispered to me: “It is nearly over—a little while and you will come no more! A little while and she will have gone, and there will be no one, and nothing here only the old, old house, and we, its voices!”

Some very busy days followed—long rehearsals every morning, and a new part, of greater or lesser length, every night; and it must have been a fortnight later when, being out of the bill, I put a bit of work in my pocket, took a book in my hand, and thus prepared for finding my old friend either in or out, started to make her a visit.

As I approached her door, I heard her talking, and said to myself, she must be over by the fire-place, her voice is so indistinct.

I tapped, but received no answer. Just then there came a pause in the talk within, and I tapped again; this time more loudly, but, to my surprise, I received no invitation to enter, though the talking was resumed in another moment.

I felt somewhat hurt, and turned to go away, but something restrained me, and I thought I would first make quite sure that she knew of my presence, I would knock loudly. As I raised my hand to do so, I heard a groan. That was enough for me; I waited no longer for permission, but opened the door and stepped in, and there amazement held me motionless; I no not know how long, for this room, whose orderliness had always been of that precise and rigid kind suggesting daily measurements with a foot-rule, was now in complete confusion. Chairs out of place, garments here and there, and the usually spotless hearth a mass of gray ashes and fallen black cinders.

And that small, rumpled heap of clothing at the foot of the bed, with white hair tossed and tangled—was that—could that be my Mrs. Worden?—she whose habits of neatness and purity were carried to the extremities; she who on a bitter winter morning, as on every other morning, sought such cramped privacy as her gaunt, old screen could secure for her, in the farthest, bleakest corner of her room, and there, with unskimped thoroughness, went through with the same process of grooming she had indulged in sixty years before, when she had had her maids to help her, after which she put herself into a sort of bolster case, with a hole in the far end for the passage of her head—and in this blue linen bag she became her own housemaid, and when the toilet of the room was finished to the points of its very fingers she again retired to the privacy of her screen and finally emerged “clothed and in her right mind,” as she used to say, when she appeared in her worn, old black gown, her black silk apron, her snow-white collar and small cuffs, and her bit of white tulle, by way of cap, upon her satin-smooth hair—and was this she, was this her room?

Suddenly Mrs. Worden drew down the arm which had been resting across her face, and, looking at me, exclaimed: “Oh, Betty, you are so late! Is breakfast ready now? My head aches, Betty; you never kept me waiting so long before!”

She rolled her head from side to side, and moaned a little, and while I threw off my wraps I recalled, with a heavy heart, the words of Mrs. Bulkley: “She’s breakin’ up; old Myra Worden is breakin’ fast.”

I hastened to reduce the room to something like order, to mend the fire and prepare some tea and rather doubtful toast, and when I had placed her in her chair and her eyes took in the familiar picture of the lake, they cleared perceptibly. She nodded her head and murmured: “Yes, my dearies, yes! I’m waiting for the sign, you won’t be long now! no, not long, not long!”

I came to her, then, with the tea and the toast, and was delighted when she called me “you girl” again, and hoped she would scold me about the fire I had made, but she scolded me no more forever.

She had asked so many times for breakfast, yet now she could not eat one morsel, but she drank her tea like one famishing. While I arranged her bed, she babbled on, and most of the time she talked to her children. Once, however, she declared that if Sally stole another cracker she would throw her from the window, and vowed no one in town would be fool enough to pick her and her vocabulary up.

When I was smoothing her white hair into something like its usual order, one lock escaped my fingers and fell forward on her chest. She saw it and cried out: “They have cut it off, oh, curse them! curse them! Betty, do you see? It’s gone, and—” she paused, looking curiously at the thin, glittering strand of hair—“and, Betty, either I’ve gone mad or it’s quite white! Oh, Betty, I can’t understand!”

And so, as Betty—some long-dead Betty from her past—I put the suffering woman back into her great skeleton of a bed, and smoothed her brow and wet her lips times uncountable, wondering at the heat in her dry, parchment-like skin, while I tried to decide what ought to be done in this emergency.

I felt that a doctor should be summoned, but I stood in absolute awe of her will, her commands, and I knew her fixed determination never to have a physician’s care. She held “she could not die, no matter what her ailments, until she had ‘the sign,’ and that when ‘the sign’ had once been given no power on earth could keep her here.”

So I dared not summon proper help; my next thought had been, naturally enough, of Mrs. Bulkley, the only friend of the old days left to her, but as fate would have it, Mrs. Bulkley was absent from the city on business that would detain her two or three days. Had I not heard my friend Mary rejoicing the night before over the very “high Jinks” the boarders were hoping to enjoy during that absence?

Then indeed my spirits sank, and I could only sit there and watch over her until she became calmer, and then I thought I would slip out and tell my landlady and get her to advise me what to do. And so the hours passed slowly by, and I looked them in the face with young, impatient eyes, and never noted their dread solemnity. For all my anxiety for the woman who was “breakin’ fast,” I had no faintest suspicion that she was already broken—that each time the clock struck off the afternoon hours—the four, or five, or six—it was, for the ancient woman in her gaunt, old bed, the last time.

To know that we are doing a thing for the last time lends a touching grace to even the commonest act; but I was blind with that black density of blindness that can come only upon the very young, and therefore the very ignorant, and I only waited for the chance to slip away and ask for help for her.

She had been quiet for some time, and I softly rose and tried to leave the room, but she stopped me. “Do not go, girl Clara,” she calmly said, and I, rejoiced, went back to her. She was quite reasonable again, expressed a small want or two, wished to be lifted higher that she might see the lake better; and when all had been accomplished, she asked me if I would stay the night with her. Then, with great diffidence, I told her I thought she should have a doctor first; she raised her hand and looked at me with such imperious fire in her black, old eyes that I silenced myself and stood quite meekly before her, while in a few sharp words she disposed of the “doctor” question.

“Pray, what was wrong any way? She supposed she had wandered a little in her speech. Well, what of it? All Cleveland called her mad. I must have heard that often enough? Why, then, a doctor to-day in special? As for Mrs. Bulkley, if she or anyone else entered this room, she would find strength to put her on the proper side of the door. Ah! she would, she was not so helpless, etc.”

In terror, lest she should again bring on her fever, I yielded to every demand, and so peace came again.

In the long silence that followed, I noticed that the wind was rising fast, that each blast was stronger and longer than the one preceding it, and that the old house trembled ominously under each fierce gust. The shadows, that earlier in the day had been content to linger in the corners, had with stealthy boldness advanced till they had filled the room with darkness, through which I heard the faint, fluttering breathing of the sick woman in her great bed, and the shrill scream of the wind as it swept across the lake to hurl itself upon the challenging city.

I rose at last to light the lamp, and lifting it, was about to place it back of the tall head-board of the bed, that its direct rays might not disturb the possible sleeper, when by chance the light fell full upon the painted face of the laughing, little Phil. The effect was wonderful; it seemed a face alive. The roguish eyes, the merry smile betraying the whitely even teeth, the little brown hand holding back the panting dog. He was joyous life personified, and I stood there wondering where the laughing child had found the courage to meet death so bravely; and, as if in answer to my thought, the faint voice of his mother came from the old bed, saying: “Yes, he was very brave, my man-child Philip, brave, brave! You know I saw it all. Aye, it was a good glass, a strong glass, and I saw. She was afraid, though she was the older, and her poor, blue eyes were strained and wild, and her quivering lips were white like her cheeks. But my Philip held her hand and stood still, while many raced madly to and fro. At one great, approaching wave I saw his lips move and I felt he cried, ‘Mammy!’ I, too, thought it was the end, but as it broke and surged away they were still standing hand in hand, and I knew Eternity in the moment I stood waiting there, waiting for that which came! There were cries and groans about me. The mighty wave seemed for one second to stand quite still, then with blinding, crushing force it struck its awful blow! It was enough; the solid deck sank swiftly from beneath their feet, the water rushed between their frightened, little lips into their laboring lungs, and it was over! With uplifted faces, and hands tight-clasped together, they went down before my tortured eyes! Ah, God! ’twas hard; in one hour my life made desolate! Yet will I worship Thee, forever! Hast Thou not said, ‘the sea shall give up its dead’? Aye, and for that great promise I worship and bow down! By the word of the Lord were the heavens made. The word of the Lord is true!”

The thin, curiously faint voice sank into silence for a few moments. I placed the lamp as I had intended, and seated myself by her bedside again. She faced the lake—the curtains drawn entirely away from the window. I faced her, leaning slightly against the bed. Her eyes were nearly closed, but her lips were moving, and presently she said, as if continuing a conversation: “No, you do not care for her. No! because her golden head is high, and she holds the broken necklace in her hand. Why broken? Did he have second sight, that artist? Did he know, and was the broken necklace in her hand meant as a warning to me? You care for my man-child, because he laughs. You do not care for my ‘gift-of-God,’ because of an air, a manner; you are wrong. ’Tis but a way, a trick of movement. On my breast, with love-tightened, little arms about my neck, she was as sweetly lovable as the meekest little maiden in the land. And when they knelt in prayer, with folded hands, her head was bowed as humbly! Oh!” she suddenly cried, “Oh! not to have their sweet bodies to love and caress and care for, not to have their eager minds to guard, to direct, to develop!”

She moaned piteously, and then, giving a great sigh, she added: “But His word is true, and there is the sign to wait for”—and so sank into a long silence.

I was watching her closely, and suddenly she seemed to cease to breathe. I rubbed her hands; I called her loudly. She feebly opened her eyes and turned them toward the cupboard in the corner. I flew to it, and searching eagerly, I found two or three bottles there, one marked cordial. I administered some as quickly as I could, and saw her revive, but from that moment I was frightened, and I noted every word she spoke and every movement that she made. Her first words made me shiver. She said: “I am not afraid, girl Clara, but I must have the sign. I cannot go without it.”

After a pause, while I resumed my seat facing her, she said: “It’s very good of you to stay with me. Strange, after so many years alone, to have companionship at the last. Old Myra Worden watched over by an actress! Verily, the world does move!” A pause, and then she babbled on: “Ever since the night you came to me out of the storm and tried to be kind to me, I have known you were some way connected with the sign. You admired my treasures there, you loved my old laces, and sometimes I thought—I almost thought that you liked me.”

“Dear Mrs. Worden,” I cried, “I love you very much!” and I lifted the hand I was holding to my lips and kissed it. I felt her start, her black, old eyes flashed wide open, she gave me a piercing glance and exclaimed: “What?—what’s that you say—you say—you——?”

I repeated with tears in my eyes: “I say, I love you very much,” and again I pressed my lips upon her cold and trembling hand. She closed her eyes; she pressed her thin lips close, but could not hide their quivering, and presently, in almost a whisper, she murmured: “Fifty and odd years since those words were used to me. ’Tis almost like a foreign tongue. But, oh, my girl, my girl! it’s mighty pleasant hearing. You—You—”

“I love you—I love you very much,” I slowly and lowly repeated, and she nodded her head at each word, and, smiling faintly, sank into quietude. The time was long, the clock struck more than once, and she had not moved. My hand was holding hers. I feared to release it lest I might disturb her. The fire was long out, and I was cold. I wondered if she was asleep. I had twice been deceived on that subject, and dare not venture an opinion. I longed for dawn. Leaning on the bed, holding her hand closely in mine, I raised my tired eyes and began dully following the involved design carved upon the high head-board. I do not know just when I lost the design, but I felt no shock when I realized that I was looking at the lake, though I had not turned round. I wondered faintly how it could be, but I went on gazing quietly across the heaving, tossing, gray, repellant waste, and in the changes that followed I heard certain words, but whether those words were spoken by myself or fell from the lips of the ancient woman at my side, I shall never know. I only know I heard—I saw.

At first the sky was dull and gray and heavy, like the lake; but as I looked far, far off, where the sky and water met, there came a whiteness of the purity of snow, and it grew and spread and filled up all the sky so far as eye could reach, and then I heard a voice say, faint and low: “Can it be mist?”

And at the words the whiteness became lambent with living fire. As sheet-lightning plays across the summer sky, so this soft fire flashed on, in, through, up, down and across the milky wonder, while the lake—oh, marvelous! The heavy gray was gone, the water clear, pure, brilliant, vast—lay like a mighty crystal, and the voice murmured: “As a sea of glass!”

Presently this lambent whiteness began to throb and thrill with color; streams of pink and rose, of amber, blue or violet, played up and down the sky—a green so vivid, so acutely pure, that the voice, speaking from the great book, said: “A rainbow like unto an emerald.”

Between me and that great background of living, opulent color I dimly saw a movement in the air, and then it thickened with crowding, opaque, white shapes, even as one has seen the air thicken with the white movement of the snow-flakes—so now, from horizon to zenith and to horizon again, all the air was filled with the swift-moving, never-resting, great, white-winged host, and ere the cry in my throat could escape my lips, these unnumbered ones fell apart into two vast bodies, while between them there lay straight across the bosom of the crystal waters a broad path of glittering light.

My heart was plunging wildly against my ribs when I heard the voice, so low, saying: “The sea knew Him—knew His voice—His touch! How the waves must have rushed upon the sand to kiss the precious foot-prints His sacred feet had made!” And while these words were uttered, out, far out, upon the glittering path arose a radiance, even then intense, almost beyond the power of mortal eye to bear; my swift lids fell to shield my dazzled sight. Yet one moment more I gazed and saw—I say I saw that supernatural radiance taking form and substance and assuming the attitude of most majestic humanity.

I could bear no more; I threw the sick woman’s hand from me to clutch at my own strangling throat, and all was gone! I saw the carved head-board—nothing more!

Shaking like a leaf, I turned my head toward Mrs. Worden’s face, and dimly I understood that, by some route of nerves, her vision had been conveyed to my brain. She sat there against her pillows gasping, her nostrils quivering, her black eyes fairly blazing. She passed her tongue across her parched lips, and I heard the low voice say: “It cannot be—no, it cannot! for He has said no man shall look upon His face! But it might be, perhaps, that! Oh! I can raise my eyes no higher—the light is blinding—and yet, and yet—oh! ’tis He! It is the Master!”

Her hands were clasped upon her breast, her body shaken by her laboring heart—while in terror of that recognition—her soft, white hair crisped itself, and moved upon her brow and hollow temples, while in a husky whisper she repeated: “’Tis He!—the All-Beautiful! Do I not see His sacred feet, beneath the falling robe press the gently yielding, watery path? Can He have come in fulfillment of the great promise?”

Then, with a piercing cry, she stretched out her arms pleadingly, saying: “Master! Master! I may not look upon the glory of Thy face, but Thou wilt hear me! Oh! Thou lover of little children—pause—pause! They lie so near Thee, but one step away! Thou wilt not pass them by! Summon them, Son of Mary! always pitiful to mothers, pity me! and summon them! Ah! the Hand is raised—the Blessed Hand, irradiating Light—is raised, and there—there—Oh King of Kings!—they are there! Hand clasped in hand—at the Beloved Master’s knee—they smile at me! they raise their little hands, and, Power Supreme! they make the sign!”

The room rang with her wild, triumphant cry of joy! She flung her frail arms wide, and repeated: “The sign! The sign!” then, “Yes, my dearies, mother’s coming! We will fall down and worship, and then we will all go on together!”

Her arms dropped suddenly—her black eyes closed—and she fell sidewise into my arms; and even in the very moment of placing her upon her pillow I cast one glance through the uncovered window and saw but the sullen sky bending low over the still more sullen lake.

She never opened her eyes again, and as she lay there so still, so white, I could not but notice how gentle her face had grown, and bending down for the first and last time, I kissed her tenderly. A slow smile came about her lips, and she spoke for the last time, when she said softly, happily: “The sign! It is the sign!”

A moment later there was a long sigh, broken by a shiver, and then stillness, perfect stillness, and I whispered: “They have all gone on together!”

“In Paris Suddenly——”