There was a pathos—a kind of tender retrospection in Anne Valery's manner as she touched the brown curls and smoothed the neat dress, which—riding hat and skirt having been laid aside or tucked up—made a pretty mountain-maiden out of Nathanael's wife. Agatha never could understand the peculiar fondness with which Miss Valery sometimes regarded her—to-day especially. She seemed constantly on the point of saying something—which she never did say. At last she rose from the stone seat.
“We will talk another day. We must go now.” Yet she lingered. “Just let us stand here, in this exact spot; and look at the view.” She looked—her eyes absorbing it from every point, as one drinks in, for the last time, a long-familiar draught of landscape beauty.. “My dear!”
The whisper was strangely soft—even solemn.
“You will remember, dear, it was I that brought you here first. You'll come here sometimes, will you not?”
“Oh, very often indeed! It is a delicious place.”
“I thought so when I was your age. And you'll not forget the stone seat, Agatha? I hope no one will disturb it. Good-bye! poor old stone.”
Saying this in a whisper, she stooped and patted it with her hand—the thin white hand that might once have been so round, pretty, and young. The act, natural even to childishness, might have made Agatha smile, but for a certain something about Miss Valery that invested with dignity even her simplicities. So, merely echoing “Goodbye, old stone!” she followed Anne down the slope.
After a loud-lamenting adieu, especially from the Dugdale boys, Miss Valery mounted her little carriage and drove away into the gathering shadow—Agatha knew not where.
“What a good woman she is! I wish we were all like her!” she said, thoughtfully.
“My dear, nobody can be, especially with a husband and four children. It is a blessing to society in general that Anne Valery never married.”