The evenings were perhaps the sweetest of all to Sister Faithful, for then her interests in the outer world ceased, and, until her cousin came, she had often felt very lonely. Now, they read aloud, played a friendly game of cribbage, or strolled about the garden when the nights were fine. Autumn was drawing near. Cousin Emerson’s visit had lengthened to two months, and still he said nothing about going. He was quite strong again, and seemed to have lost the melancholy that at first overshadowed him. Faithful’s heart rejoiced as she looked at him, and she did not allow herself to think that it might end.
One morning, in early September, the post brought several letters. They were breakfasting. Faithful remembered every detail afterwards. The pungent odour of chrysanthemums always carried her back to that morning. Cousin Emerson had gathered for the breakfast-table the splendid bunch that adorned it.
Suddenly a look of intense happiness lighted up his face. “Faithful Sister,” he said, looking across at her, “I want you to be the first to congratulate me. At last the woman whom I adore, for love of whom I have been so miserable, has consented to marry me. I doubt whether, if I had not fallen into your dear hospitable hands, I could have struggled so well to recover.”
In his excitement, Cousin Emerson did not notice the pallor that swept over Faithful’s face. Her voice was steady as she said, “Why have you not let us sympathize with you all along?”
“Oh, it all seemed so hopeless,” he said, “and I could not bear to open the old wound; but I am to go up to London at once, and I shall bring my bride straight to Edgecombe, if I may.”
That night he left, after many cordial expressions of gratitude, and Sister Faithful, apparently unmoved, saw him go; but afterward she had no mind to wander about the garden, or read a favourite book. She went quietly to her room, and, for the first time, wept.
She knew she had been companionable to this man; that in her society he had found peace and content. And yet—in a moment—he had forgotten it all; he had gone to win some other woman, impelled by what he called love. Was it love she felt for him? Even then, in her loneliness, with a grey-skyed future before her, and no prospect of change, she felt only her own inconsistency. “He was my kinsman and guest; he never asked me to love him, and he never knew my feeling for him,” she argued, and so the night passed, a night of unselfish sorrow for the lonely woman, while the man was being whirled towards the one being who engrossed his thoughts.
Afterward, when Cousin Emerson and his wife came to Edgecombe to visit, he remarked, in the privacy of their room, that Cousin Faithful had aged terribly; but to the poor people she seemed more saintly than ever, for after that one happy summer—the only time she had ever allowed herself any personal happiness—she had returned to her charities as if she wished to make up for some neglect. And when the villagers called her “Sister Faithful,” she felt it almost as a reproach that she had dared hope for any other name.
IV.
Miss Cameron’s Art Sale.
Katherine Cameron was spending her third winter in Paris. The first year she had led a quiet, uneventful student’s life. The second season she launched out a little into society as represented by the English and American colonies, and now she was spoken of as that “clever and rich Miss Cameron,” whom the English-speaking residents remembered to have seen at various musicales the year before.