“I would call him something worse,” declared Nancy with heat.
There was quiet for a little as they all sat thinking.
“And did you think that you might find him here, Aunt Anna?” Beatrice finally asked slowly.
“I thought we might find him or get news of him. When the doctor said this year I must go away or—or not get well, I vowed that, if it were the last thing I did, I would look for him once more. He loved this place so much that I always felt, somehow, that he would come back to it. We had written to him here, but the letters came back to us with word that no such person was to be found; and your father made inquiries when he came to get us a house. He did not approve much of our settling down here for the summer, but I was determined and he had to give way.”
“Yet we almost had to go back,” Nancy observed.
“Yes, if it had not been for Beatrice’s thinking of the cabin and for her courage in bringing us here, we would have had to give it up. And so far we have heard nothing, but I cannot help hoping that we still may.”
“But why, Aunt Anna, why did you never tell us before?” Beatrice put the question with the same puzzled frown she had worn when the story began.
“I wanted to, but I could not bear to. You were always so hurried and so deep in affairs of your own, as is the natural thing. To tell you and have you think, even for a fleeting minute, that my brother did wrong—that would have been beyond endurance. He is only a name to you, and after all, as Robert Kirby says, nothing has ever been proved. But you must believe in my brother; you must.”
She leaned back and a slow tear of weariness and long-endured misery rolled down her cheek. The recital had tired her far more than they had realized, so that Nancy, suddenly taking alarm, whisked her away to bed. There, with many loving pats and hugs and words of affectionate comfort, they at last saw her ready for sleep.
Yet Beatrice, lying broad awake in her little room, watching the curtains flutter in the windy dark, could not put from her mind the thought of what she had heard. Presently she got up to steal into Nancy’s room opposite and see how she was faring. She found that the bed was empty and that her sister was kneeling by the window, staring out into the forest. A solitary coyote was yelping in the woods, but it was a sound to which they had become so accustomed that it was doubtful if they even heard it. The pale light of a late moon showed the moving tree-tops, the dark chasm of the stream, and, hardly to be discerned among the pines, the square chimney stacks and one tiny light that marked the place of John Herrick’s house.