“Yes,” the mother answered, “it was a regular good letter, if I do say it that had n’t ought. He’s comin’ home.”
“Comin’ home?” echoed Hannah, in a twitter of excitement. “I want to know! Comin’ home himself?”
“I dunno what you mean by comin’ home himself,” Sarah replied, with a mild facetiousness born of her joy at the news the letter had brought; “but ’t ain’t at all likely he’ll come home nobody else. He’s comin’, ’t any rate. It’ll be curious to see how him and Miss Edith ’ll act. It’ll be ten years since they said good-by to one another, and ten years is considerable of a spell.”
“Happen he’ll be changed,” Hannah observed. “Ten years does most usually change folks more or less.”
“Happen,” Sarah responded, in a graver and lower tone, “he’ll find her changed.”
As if to give opportunity for the testing of the truth of this remark, the slight figure of Edith Grayman at that moment appeared at the head of the steep and crooked stairway which led from the chambers of the old house into the kitchen close by the porch door. She was a woman whose face had lost the first freshness of youth, although her summers counted but twenty-seven. Perhaps it was that the winters of her life had been so much the longer seasons. There was in her countenance that expression of mild melancholy which is the heritage from generations of ancestors who have sadly watched the wasting of race and fortune, and the even more bitter decay of the old order of things to which they belong. She was slender and graceful in shape, with a stately and gracious carriage, and the air of the patrician possibly a faint shade too marked in her every motion.
As she came slowly down the time-stained stairway, her fair hair twisted high upon her shapely head, her lips slightly pressed together, and her violet eyes pensive and introspective, Edith might have passed for the ghost of the ancestress whose rejuvenated gown of pale blue camlet she wore.
The long shadows of the lugubrious Lombardy poplars had already begun to stretch out in far-reaching lines, as if laying dusky fingers on the aged mansion, and the sun shone across the river with a light reddened by the autumn hazes. The knitters, as they turned at the sound of Edith’s footfall, shone in a sort of softened glory, and into this they saw her descend as she came down the winding stair.
“Father is asleep,” Miss Grayman said, stepping into the porch with a light tread. “I am going down to the shore for a breath of air before the night mist rises. You will hear father’s bell if he wakes.”
She moved slowly down the path which led toward the river, and the regards of the two old women followed her as she went.