And then she rose suddenly and lighted a lamp. “I always have a chapter before I go to bed,” she said. “You might read it to-night.”
Esther was surprised. She had somehow gained the impression, in Aunt Katharine’s talks with her brother, that she held the scriptures rather lightly, but apparently this was wrong. “What shall I read?” she asked, going to the stand on which lay the Bible, a large and very old one.
“Read me that chapter about Judith,” she said, “how she delivered her people out of the hand of Holofernes, and all the city stood up and blessed her.”
Esther sat for a moment with a puzzled face, her finger between the leaves of the book. “Is that in Judges?” she asked, with a vague remembrance of a prophetess who led Israel to battle.
The old woman lifted her eyebrows. “Oh, that is in the Apocrypha,” she said. “Well, if you don’t know about Judith you mustn’t begin at the end of her story. Read me about Deborah; that’s a good place.”
There was no sweeter sleep under the stars that night than came to Esther. She had thought with some foreboding of a feather bed, but it was the best of hair mattresses that Aunt Katharine provided. Even the high-post bedstead, with draperies of ancient pattern, which she had really hoped for, was wanting. There was nothing to prevent the air which came through the wide east window, full of woodsy odors and the droning of happy insects, from coming straight to her pillow.
There was indeed nothing in the room to recall the fashions of the past except the coverlet, wrought in mazy figures tufted of crocheting cotton, and a round silk pincushion mounted on a standard of glass, which standard suggested former service as part of a lamp. Aunt Katharine had as little care to preserve the customs of her foremothers as their ways of thinking. She had told the girl to rise when she felt like it; but in the early morning Esther found herself wide awake, and the sound of stirring below brought her quickly to her feet.
Aunt Katharine was busy about the stove when she entered the kitchen, and the sight of her niece in her clean work-apron evidently pleased her. They took a cup of tea with a fresh egg and a slice of toast at the kitchen table, and Esther tried to recall her dream of the night before for the entertainment of the other. “It must have been reading about Deborah that put it into my head,” she said. “I thought I was living all by myself in a house that was under a great oak tree, and all sorts of people were coming to me on all sorts of errands, and finally I was going out with a great company of them to battle, but I don’t know what the battle was about, or how it came out,” she ended lightly. “I think the dream must have broken off when I heard you moving about down here.”
“Dreams are queer things,” said Aunt Katharine, who had been listening with attention.
“Of course I don’t believe in them,” Esther made haste to say, “but Aunt Milly always insisted that the first dream you had when you slept in a strange place meant something. I’m sure it meant something to sleep in such a lovely room, and rest as sweetly as I did,” she added, with an affectionate smile at the old lady.