Then, as if he were compelled to say the final hard thing, he added, 'Wasn't there something you had already thought you should do when everything was in your hands?'
Rachel, startled and flushing, faced him again, in involuntary confession. 'I had always thought it would be right to carry out a plan of Richard Hughes's.'
'Yes, I know. I am sure that was only a momentary notion of his. He had a great habit of making notes of things. His will was made only a few days before he died, and that idea was probably earlier. I was an executor, you remember. But anyway, several years ago John made a large gift to the library of Richard's college, in Richard's name. He took no chances on being unfair. He should have told you,' he added, 'but John had a hard sort of pride to manage, and I suppose he never did.'
'No,' said Rachel, 'he never did.'
She rose, with a sudden dropping of her hands at her sides, as if relinquishing something they had held, and moved vaguely toward the door.
'Don't you think,' pursued David, 'that he might be brought in here—or somewhere?'
Rachel hesitated, her hand faltering on the door-frame. 'No,' she said at last, 'let him stay there now.' And she herself went out through the dim chill hall. She lingered a moment at the closed library door, and then went slowly on up to her own empty room.
OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT[8]
BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE
'I WANT to tell you—I must tell you all about it.'
With a kind of grave finality, the little woman in the deck chair next to mine snapped together the collapsible drinking-cup with which she had been playing, and sat up, laying a small eager hand on my arm. It was as if her groping thoughts had suddenly pushed open a door into action. I wondered if she guessed that I had been peeping at her from under dropped lids. She had the colorless make-up of a small middle-aged mouse, but her expression was amazing. It startled and arrested one. All the old lines of the face were set to small ambitions and sordid desires, but the look which should have accompanied these lines was clean gone—wiped into something big and still and simple—and her manner was that of an earnest child.