Luther Hansen came in after dark. Elizabeth answered his knock.
“Alone?” he asked in astonishment when he entered the sitting room.
“Yes. Mr. Chamberlain wanted John to bring the men over and load hogs for him. It’s been too hot to take them to town in the daytime. Hugh’s asleep, I think,” she said in a low tone. “I didn’t take a light in, because he likes to be in the dark, but I spoke to him two or three times and he didn’t answer. Are you in a hurry? I hate to waken him.”
Doctor Morgan came as they talked. He stopped to look Elizabeth over before going to the sickroom, and then took the lamp she handed him and, followed by Luther, left Elizabeth standing in the dining room. She heard the doctor’s sharp order, “Take this light, Hansen,” and ran to help.
The horror, the anguish, the regret of that hour are best left untold. The number of disks gone from the bottle under the pillow gave the doctor his clue. One final effort must have been made by the desperate invalid to secure for himself the drink which would wash them down without the dreaded coughing spell.
The old doctor, who loved them both, and Luther Hansen also, witnessed Elizabeth’s despair, and listened to her story. As Luther had said a few weeks before, he was a safe person, and her secret remained a secret. Luther led her away into the night and sat silently by while her grief spent itself in tears; it was a necessary stage. When John and the men came, he led her back, and himself met them at the gate to explain.
The morning and the evening were the first day; the comings and goings of the inquisitive and the sympathetic were alike unremarked by Elizabeth. Only for that first hour did her grief run to tears; it was beyond tears. At the coroner’s inquest she answered penetrating questions as if they related to the affairs of others, and when at last the weary body, whose spirit had been strong enough to lay it aside, had been buried on the bare hillside, the neighbours and those who came to the funeral from curiosity agreed that Elizabeth Hunter could stand anything. So little evidence of emotion had she given that Mrs. Crane remarked to Mrs. Farnshaw as they rode home together:
“I declare, Lizzie’s th’ coolest hand I ever met. She couldn’t ’a’ liked Mr. Noland very much. She wasn’t near as broke up as Mr. Hunter was, an’ when I asked her if she wouldn’t feel kind of spooky in that house after such a thing, she just looked at me, funny-like, an’ says ‘Why?’ an’ didn’t seem t’ care a bit.”
Doctor Morgan drove home from the graveyard with the family.
“I suppose you know, Hunter, that there’s a will,” he said before he helped Elizabeth into the buggy.