“Rhoda! What a dear girl you are! Forgive you! You’ll come back soon?”
“As soon as I can.” She turned at the door, still smiling gently, and held up at him a warning finger. “But you must promise not to talk about love!”
“All right, Rhoda. If you won’t stay away long, I’ll promise—for next time!”
Outside the door a trembling seized her and she leaned against the wall. “I didn’t give up,” she told herself, “I didn’t, that time. But could I—again?”
She went into her own room and knelt beside the window, whence, a few nights before she had seen the mulatto refugee and her babies come trudging up the street. Vividly the picture came before her mind and with it once more the thought of all that such a flight must mean to a woman, alone and in the dark, with two helpless children, herself almost as helpless as they. She bowed her head upon the window sill and whispered: “O God! Dear God in heaven, give me strength to keep myself away from that accursed thing! Save me from my own heart, which tempts me so, and keep me, O God, keep me from giving up!”
When she rose from her knees, she did not go at once downstairs, but moved about the room, doing little things that did not need to be done, straightening a pillow on the bed, moving a chair, raising the window shade, then lowering it again, rearranging the things on her bureau. And at last, irresolutely, she opened a drawer and took out the little box tied with white ribbon. She held the withered rose in her palm, kissed it, and said softly, “Good-by, dear love, good-by.”
Perhaps she believed at that moment that she would never again allow herself to caress and to brood over this little symbol of her love, that she would never again give up to her heart even in a privacy where none but herself could know that she had yielded. But she carefully put the box away again in the same hiding place, which she knew so well that her hand could go straight thither with her eyes shut. For her years numbered but two and twenty and they had fallen from her along an easy path, marked as yet by struggles too few to have taught her that God helps only him who helps himself to the uttermost, and that perhaps far more of God is in his own strivings than in the distant heaven to which he prays.
On the stairway she met her father. “I’ve been looking for you, Rhoda,” he said. “Come into the office.” There he carefully shut the doors, after a hurried glance round about. “I’ve just had a letter,” he went on in a lowered voice, “from Alexander Wilson. You remember him, don’t you?”
“Yes, father. The young Canadian who was here a month or so ago, to study the Underground Road, and went on south to stir up the slaves. Did I tell you that the woman I took to Gilbertson’s the other night had been started by him?”
“No! Was she? He’s doing a good work down there, at tremendous risks, too! If they find out what he’s up to it will mean tarring and feathering, and lynching afterward, and all of it on the spot. He’s a brave fellow, Rhoda! Where did he send this woman from?”