Stella’s eyes were on the floor, and she did not raise them as she said, after a long pause, “I don’t quite make you out, Esther, but you are an awfully nice girl. I wish it wasn’t so far between here and Indiana.”
“I shall never think it’s far after this,” said Esther, giving her cousin’s hand a little squeeze. And then she added cheerfully, “Don’t you think it would be nice to give Mr. Hadley one of grandfather’s old books? There are some of them, you know, that are really very curious, and he’s so fond of those rare old things. I’ll tell him that you’ve taken one for him; I believe it would please him.”
She had more misgiving as to how Aunt Katharine would receive the news of her changed intention, but not from her either did she meet any entreaties. The old woman seemed strangely broken by her brother’s death. It was she beyond all others who had been stricken. An apathy which was wholly new had settled upon her, and was only shaken off at moments when she talked of him.
“I thought he’d outlive me by years,” she said to Esther. “I always twitted him with thinking that he was so much smarter than the rest of us; but he was, and I used to think, as he did, that he might live to see his hundred years. I don’t know why he shouldn’t have had ’em.” And then she added, with a quaver in her voice: “I wish I’d spoke up when he said what he did the day I came in. I’ve riled him too, sometimes, when I needn’t, but it took me so by surprise that I couldn’t answer then. All I could think of was that he was going to die.” She drew a long sigh, and ended, “You must do as you think best, child, about going home. I don’t blame you any for changing your plans.”
She went back to her own house the day after the funeral, in spite of Aunt Elsie’s entreaty that she should stay. “It’s good of you, Elsie,” she said, with a shake of her head, “and I guess I could live with you as easy as I could with anybody; but I should miss him more here than I should anywhere else, and I’d rather be in my own place.”
They let her go, but Aunt Elsie said the last word with affectionate earnestness, as she passed out at the door: “Don’t be sick or in any kind of trouble without letting us know. I’ll do for you there just as willingly as here if you should happen to need me.”
Three days later Esther was gone too. She took a silent farewell of her grandfather’s room, looked long from the windows at the hills she had come to love so much and stepped out of the family circle like a daughter of the house whose place no one else would ever quite fill. Stella went with her to the depot, and their hands unclasped reluctantly when the last moment came. There were thoughts which neither whispered to the other, and they wondered as they looked in each other’s eyes whether the time would ever come when they could fully tell them, but Esther understood best what the silence held.
It was that other day over again when she came home to her own, but the welcome lacked something of the boisterous gladness which had greeted Kate, and the mother’s smile was full of tears as she clasped the girl in her arms. No one, not even Mrs. Northmore, understood exactly why she had given up the Boston plan. The grandfather’s going away, in the fullness of his ripe old age, hardly seemed a reason why she should relinquish pleasures which had looked so bright, and an opportunity which had meant so much to her. However, they were all most heartily glad to have her at home again, especially Kate, and the latter felt a little foolish, remembering that morning at Aunt Katharine’s, when it appeared from Esther’s report that the old woman had not objected at all to her giving up the engagement which she had believed to be planned with such deep and deadly designs. Really, it seemed that she had lashed herself up to that affair and been disagreeable on quite gratuitous grounds. She admitted it, to herself, with her usual frankness, and thanked her stars, in a strictly private manner, that no one but Aunt Katharine and herself knew it, save Tom.
To Mrs. Northmore, watching Esther thoughtfully by the steady light of mother-love, it seemed that the girl had found real value in the summer. She seemed somehow older, looking at things more quietly, and with a leisure from herself which, in spite of her ready sympathy for others, had too often been wanting in the past. It was an aid against the restlessness which might have come when a sudden vacancy in one of the Rushmore schools brought her at Christmas an unexpected offer of the position. She accepted it with her mother’s quick consent, doing good work and enjoying it, as well as the pay that came with it. Indeed, as she carried home her check at the end of each month, she was impressed more than ever with the soundness of certain views of Aunt Katharine’s on the moral value of earning and owning. She wrote to the latter repeatedly, and once Aunt Katharine replied; but she was not fond of her pen, and the letter, though affectionate, was brief.
There were longer letters from Stella, letters of the chatty, personal sort, with a generous sprinkling of family news. Mr. Hadley was calling often. If he had sustained any disappointment that the cousins were not in Boston together, he was apparently consoling himself with the company of the one who was left. They were going to art lectures and symphony concerts together, and the married sister had called.