"Everything shall be just as you will, Auna. You'll be mistress and I'll be man."
She laughed and they tramped forward. Jacob could now walk all day without suffering for it, but he was lame and his pace slower than of old.
He brought the key with him and opened the silent house. A week rarely passed without a visit, and Jacob always awoke to animation and interest when he came. The melancholy spot and mean chambers, though they had chilled not a few human hearts in the past, always cheered him. To a dwelling whence others had thankfully departed for the last time, he now looked forward with satisfaction; and Auna, seeing that only here came any peace to her father, welcomed Huntingdon already as her future home. Not a shadow clouded her eyes as she regarded it, and not one regret before the receding vision of Red House and her own life therein. For her father was her world, as he had always been, and when he turned against his home, she echoed him and loved Red House no more. She knew that for Jacob the death of her mother had destroyed Red House; she understood that he desired to begin again and she felt well content to begin again with him. His influence had come between her and normal development in certain directions. She was old for her age, but also young. No instinct of sex had intruded upon her life, and little interest in any being outside her own home circle. Even within it her sister and brothers were nothing compared to her father, and impulses, fears, suspicions that might have chilled a girl's forward glance under the walls of forlorn Huntingdon, never rose in Auna's mind to darken the future. Her father willed there to dwell and her welfare and happiness as yet took no flight beyond him.
They wandered through the stone-paved kitchen and climbed to the little chambers above, while for the twentieth time, Jacob planned how things should be.
"I'll have this room," he said, "because the sun sets upon it; and you will bide here, Auna, because it's fitting the sun shall rise where you wake."
She was happy when he spoke thus tenderly sometimes.
"My sun set, when mother died," continued Jacob. "What's left is twilight; but you'll be the evening star, Auna, as it says in mother's little book. You can read it if you want to. I'll let it touch no other hand but yours. I've read every word many times, because I know her eyes rested on every word once."
"I'm afraid I don't understand about poetry, father."
"You'll come to understand it when you're older, perhaps. She understood it and got pleasure from it."
The desolation of the warren house soothed Jacob, and having wandered through it he sat for a time outside the enclosures before starting to return home. He rolled his melancholy eyes over the great spaces to a free horizon of the hills folding in upon each other.