She was trying to think. Her mind had been crushed. She sat dazed. It seemed to her an age since these women—these strangely kind-hearted, newly charitable women—had been here. Or, had she only dreamed that they were here? Had it been a passage of angels she herself had witnessed here?
She had told Miss Julia not to let Don come to see her just yet. So, though she had heard the great news of his release, she had not met him. "I'll have to think, Julia," she said. "I don't know what I'll do. I must be alone."
The window of her shop was still unmended. The red hat which had been so long, in one redressing or another, the sign of her wares, now was bent and broken beyond all possibility of restoration. The walls were bare, the furniture was broken. It was wreck and ruin that lay about her, as dully she still was conscious.
Twenty years of it—and this was the climax! What place was there left for her in all the world? As she sat, hour after hour, alone, Aurora Lane was thinking of the dark pool under the bridge, of how cool and comforting it might be. Her bosom rose, torn now and then with deep, slow sobs, like the ground swell of a sea moved by some vast, remote, invisible cause. She had been sobbing thus for some twenty-four hours.
She had not moved about very much today in her household, had not often left her chair here at the table. The mob had destroyed most of her pitiful store of gear, so there was small choice left her.
Somewhere she had found, deep down in a trunk tray, an old and faded garment, its silken sleeves so worn that the creases were now open—a blouse which she had put away long, long ago—twenty years and more ago. She wore it as best she might; and over the neck where the silk was gone she had cast a white shawl, also of silk, a thing likewise come down, treasured, from her meager girlhood days. This would serve her, so she thought, until she could find heart to go to bed and endeavor to find sleep.... Yes. They may have been of her own mother's wedding finery. Yes. Perhaps she one day had planned they might be parts of her own wedding gear.... But she had had no wedding.
She had done her hair, with Miss Julia's weeping aid, as simply as might be—as she had when she was younger. It lay now in long, heavy, deep rolls, down the nape of her white neck, along the sides of her head, covering her little ears, still shapely. Her face was white as death, but still it held traces in its features, sharpened and refined, of what once was a tender and joyous beauty of its own—a beauty now high and spiritual. In her time Aurora Lane had been known far and wide as a very beautiful girl; self-willed, yes; wild—but beautiful. She did not remember these things now, not in the least; and there was no mirror left unbroken in the place.
The evening waxed on, approaching nine of the clock, at which time good folk began to turn up the porch chairs against the wall so that the rain might not hurt them if it came, and to draw back into the stuffy rooms and to prepare for the use of the stuffy beds. Fathers of families now drank deeply at the pitcher of ice water left on the center table. One little group after another, visible here and there on the porches or the stairs along the little street, lessened and gradually disappeared. One by one the lights went out all over the town. By ten o'clock the town would have settled down to slumber. It was Monday, and on Monday night not even the most ardent swains frequent hammocks or front parlors at an hour so late as ten o'clock in our town, Saturday night and the Lord's day being more especially set apart for these usages.
But the light in Aurora Lane's house still burned. She did not know how late it was. The clock on the mantel was silent, for it had been broken by the men who had been there the night before. She sat motionless as a woman of stone. Not even her boy was there—not even Miss Julia was there. She was alone—with her future, and with her past.
It must have been toward midnight when at length Aurora Lane raised her head, turned a little. She had heard a sound! A sharp pang of terror caught at her—sheer, unreasoning terror. Were they coming again? But no, it was not the sound of many footfalls, not the sound of many voices.