"Are you going to take him?" A humorous glance made Ellen's eyes look like her father's.
"I don't know." Mrs. Sassaman now wept outright.
"Of course you are!"
"He isn't like your father."
Ellen did not understand the implication—no one was like her father. At the thought of him she was overcome. She had been here for two months and had learned nothing; the exhausting work at the laundry took all one's time, and even Sundays had been profitless, spent as they were in weariness and idleness. Her life was narrower than it had been at home and Mrs. Sassaman and Mrs. Lebber were even less congenial than the companions she had left behind. The amount of her savings was growing, but very slowly.
She wished Mrs. Sassaman well, bought her a wedding present which she could ill afford, and on Thanksgiving Day accompanied her and her farmer to the preacher's. Mrs. Lebber provided a heavy and bountiful dinner which she felt to be a waste.
"She will be back," she prophesied. "I don't mean that anything will go wrong between them; that is not what I mean at all. I mean that she and I do not have good luck with husbands. Between us we have already lost three. I think this one is so yellow. It is not that I cannot marry that I sit here."
On the Sunday afternoon following Thanksgiving Ellen went to walk. The air was mild, and the holiday on Thursday had saved her from Sunday's usual exhaustion. She walked down to the railroad station, intending, none too cheerfully, to go over the course which she and her father had followed on a happy day. In the Capitol she walked from room to room reconsecrating herself to the divinity which she worshiped.
Then she sought the river street. It was not yet twilight and she walked slowly as she and her father had walked. She crossed a bridge and looked back at the domes and spires. The city, nestling against a background of blue hills, took on in the afternoon sunshine the rich colors of a much older settlement. She returned slowly, conscious of the beauty and of her own misery and went northward as she and her father had gone.
Here in the park, opposite the gray house which she had admired, they had stood. The house remained exactly as it was. She sat down, no suspicion of its ownership, no premonition of a strange future stirring her, and looked now out across the quiet river and now at the house. Only a few of the shades were raised—had the occupants died also? Presently she believed that she saw at a window in the third story a face with a black mark upon it, but she did not regard it curiously or wonder whether it was in some way disfigured, or whether a shadow fell upon it; it was a face dull to her and her miseries. She dried her eyes at first gently and then with an angry pressure, fearing that she was going to cry hysterically as she had done several times after her father's death.