She passed her hand softly to and fro across my hair, brushing it away from my temples, while they throbbed and burned; but she did not speak. By and by I sobbed out:—
“Auntie, Auntie, Auntie!” as Faith sobs out in the dark. It seemed to me that I must have help or die.
“Yes, dear. I understand. I know how hard it is. And you have been bearing it alone so long! I am going to help you, and you must tell me all you can.”
The strong, decided words, “I am going to help you,” gave me the first faint hope I have had, that I could be helped, and I could tell her—it was not sacrilege—the pent-up story of these weeks. All the time her hand went softly to and fro across my hair.
Presently, when I was weak and faint with the new comfort of my tears, “Aunt Winifred,” I said, “I don’t know what it means to be resigned; I don’t know what it means!”
Still her hand passed softly to and fro across my hair.
“To have everything stop all at once! without giving me any time to learn to bear it. Why, you do not know,—it is just as if a great black gate had swung to and barred out the future, and barred out him, and left me all alone in any world that I can ever live in, forever and forever.”
“My child,” she said, with emphasis solemn and low upon the words,—“my child, I do know. I think you forget—my husband.”
I had forgotten. How could I? We are most selfishly blinded by our own griefs. No other form than ours ever seems to walk with us in the furnace. Her few words made me feel, as I could not have felt if she had said more, that this woman who was going to help me had suffered too; had suffered perhaps more than I,—that, if I sat as a little child at her feet, she could teach me through the kinship of her pain.
“O my dear,” she said, and held me close, “I have trodden every step of it before you,—every single step.”