‘It has been such a happy day,’ she had told Aunt Rutha, as, after the merry supper was over, she had stood by her side in the soft-lighted library. ‘Such a happy day, without a flaw!’ And now already it seemed to be fading into the dim, dim past! And yet it was only a few hours since Richard Everidge had climbed lightly up after the spray of brilliant leaves which she had admired, and she had pinned them against the dark background of her riding habit; even now they were before her on the table. She looked at them with a dull sense of pain.
‘Mother has had a stroke of some sort,’ Mr Harding wrote, ‘the doctor doesn’t seem to know rightly what. She is somewhat better, but she can’t leave her bed. The children are well, except Polly, who seems weakly. The doctor thinks her spine has been hurt. Mother had her in her arms when she fell.’
Pauline shivered. Was this God’s ‘best’ for her? The letter dropped from her hand, and she sat for hours motionless, her eyes taking in every detail of the pretty moonlit room, until it was indelibly engraved upon her memory.
When the morning came she took the letter to Tryphosa. She could not trust herself to tell the others yet.
The eyes that looked up at her from the open sheet were very tender.
‘Dear child, are you satisfied?’
‘With what, my lady?’
‘With Christ, and the life He has planned for you?’
She hesitated. If it had been this other life that she had been planning for herself only the day before, how gladly she would have answered: but, if it should be Sleepy Hollow, could she say yes?