“Things changed after grandfather died,” she said. She hesitated a moment, then took refuge in the formula she had used so often to the others, but with a clause she had not whispered before, as she added, “Somehow I knew there was nothing I really wanted except to come home—and have you come too.”
He murmured something rapturous. But he was not quite satisfied yet. After a little he said, “Esther, do you remember telling me once that if you had half a chance you’d live a different life from the common workaday sort; you’d have culture, and leisure, and travel, and all those things? You did have a chance, didn’t you?”
She flushed. “No one offered it to me,” she said. “Perhaps no one ever would. At any rate—” her voice sounded nervous but happy—“if ’twas ‘half a chance,’ I ran away from the other half. I didn’t want anything but you, Mort. I shall have whatever you have, and that’s enough.”
He threw back his head and drew a long breath. “Oh, I mean to do so much for you,” he said. “It seems to me I can accomplish anything now.”
There was the murmur of excited talking in the sitting room at the Northmores’ when they opened the door at last. “Well, of all the strange things she ever did, I call that the strangest,” the doctor was saying in the tone of one grappling with a mystery.
The two young people looked at each other wondering. Then Esther said, in a merry whisper, “He doesn’t mean me. He’ll think I’ve done the most sensible thing in the world.”
They walked toward the room, and the next moment Kate was in the hall to meet them. She was quite pale, and an unusual excitement showed in her manner. Even the sight of Morton Elwell seemed hardly to divert her preoccupation. “We heard you had come, and I’m so glad,” she said. Then, turning to her sister, she exclaimed: “Esther, the strangest thing you ever knew has happened. Aunt Katharine is dead. Mother got a letter just now.”
“Dead!” repeated Esther. It did not cross her mind to wonder why they thought this thing so strange. The fact itself filled her with a great and sudden sadness. “Poor dear Aunt Katharine!” she said, and in the light of what the last hour had brought to herself the thought of all the brave old heart had missed, and how stanchly she had borne it, filled her with a new love and pity. “How did it happen?”
“She died suddenly,” said Kate. “Aunt Elsie wrote about it. But it isn’t that. It’s her will! Oh, you can’t think how she’s left her money. It seems as if she couldn’t have meant it.”
An unmistakable alarm leaped into Esther Northmore’s eyes, and she turned suddenly to Morton Elwell. “We were great friends,” she whispered, in a low hurried tone, “but nothing, nothing could make any difference now.”