The doctor walked away through the woods in the direction of the house. Let us also leave the orphan to her sacred grief, nor inquire whether she spent the next hour in weeping or in prayer. The doctor kept on to the house and told his daughter Clare to prepare the best bedchamber for the accommodation of her friend Margaret.
And before the dew fell, true to her promise, Margaret came in.
Clare took charge of her. If ever there existed a perfectly sound mind in a perfectly sound body, that body and mind was Clare Hartley’s. She was “a queen of noble nature’s crowning.” She was a fine, tall, well-developed girl, with a fresh and ruddy complexion, hair as black as the black eagle’s crest, and eyes as bright and strong as his glance when sailing toward the sun; with a cheerful smile, and a pleasant, elastic voice. She took charge of Margaret, and in her wise, strong, loving way, ministered to all her needs—knowing when to speak to her, and better still, when to be silent—when to wait upon her, and best of all, when to leave her alone. And Margaret was by her own desire very much left alone.
Every morning she stole from the house, and went down through the woods to sit beside her mother’s grave. For the first few days, the hours passed there were spent in inconsolable grief. Then after a week she would sit there quietly, tearlessly, in pensive thought.
In the second week of her stay, Mrs. Houston came and brought her clothing from the island, and with it a large packet of linen cut out and partly sewed. This was a set of shirts that Margaret and her mother had been making up for her father the very day that Mrs. Helmstedt had been struck with her death sickness.
“I thought that if she could be interested in any of her former occupations, her spirits might sooner rally,” said Mrs. Houston to Clare. And afterward, in delivering the parcel to Margaret, she said:
“You know, your father will be home soon, my dear, and will want these to take back to camp with him. Will you not try to finish them all in time?”
“Oh, yes! give them to me! how could I forget them. She was so anxious they should be done,” said Margaret, with an eagerness strangely at variance with her earnest, mournful countenance.
In unrolling the packet, she came upon the shirt-ruffles that she knew her mother had been hemming. There were the very last stitches she had set. There was the delicate needle just where she had stuck it when she left her sewing to go out into the garden that fatal morning. Margaret burst into tears and wept as if her heart would break, until she became exhausted. Then she reverently rolled up that relic, saying:
“I cannot finish this ruffle. I would not draw out the needle her fingers put there, for the world. I will keep this unchanged in remembrance of her.”