The night wind sighed through the old sycamores of Kennedy Square. A soft haze, the harbinger of the coming spring, filled the air. The cold moon, hanging low, bleached the deserted steps of the silent houses to a ghostly white.
In the Horn mansion a dim light burned in Richard's room and another in the lower hall. Everywhere else the house was dark.
Across the Square, in Miss Clendenning's boudoir, a small wood fire, tempering the chill of the April night, slumbered in its bed of ashes, or awakened with fitful starts, its restless blaze illumining the troubled face of Margaret Grant. The girl's eyes were fixed on the dying coals, her chin in her hand, the brown-gold of her wonderful hair gold-red in the firelight. Now and then she would lift her head as if listening for some approaching footstep. Miss Clendenning sat beside her, leaning over the hearth in her favorite attitude, her tiny feet resting on the fender.
The years had touched the little lady but lightly since that night when she sat in this same spot and Oliver had poured out his heart to her. She was the same dainty, precise, lovable old maid that she had been in the old days of Kennedy Square, when the crocuses bloomed in the flower-beds and its drawing-rooms were filled with the wit and fashion of the day. Since that fatal night when Richard had laid away his violin and brother had been divided against brother, and Kennedy Square had become the stamping ground of armed men, she had watched by the bedsides of a thousand wounded soldiers, regardless of which flag they had battled under. The service had not withered her. Time had simply stood still, forgetting the sum of its years, while it marked her with perennial sweetness.
"I'm afraid he's worse," Margaret said, breaking the silence of the room, as she turned to Miss Clendenning, "or Ollie would have been here before this. Dr. Wallace was to go to the house at eleven, and now it is nearly twelve."
"The doctor may have been detained," Miss Clendenning answered. "There is much sickness in town."
For a time neither spoke. Only the low muttering of the fire could be heard, or the turning of some restless coal.
"Margaret," Miss Clendenning said at last—it had always been "Margaret" with the little lady ever since the day she had promised Oliver to love the woman whom he loved; and it was still "Margaret" when the women met for the first time in the gray dawn at the station and Miss Clendenning herself helped lead Richard out of the train—"There is a bright side to every trouble. But for this illness you would never have known Oliver's mother as she really is. All her prejudices melted away as soon as she looked into your face. She loves you better every day, and she is learning to depend on you just as Richard and Oliver have done."
"I hope she will," the young woman answered, without moving. "It breaks my heart to see her suffer as she does. I see my own mother in her so often. She is different in many ways, but she is the same underneath—so gentle and so kind, and she is so big and broad-minded too. I am ashamed to think of all the bitter feelings I used to have in my heart toward her."
She stopped abruptly, her hands tightly folded in her lap, her shoulders straightened. Margaret's confessions were always made in this determined way, head thrown back like a soldier's, as though a new resolve had been born even while an old sin was being confessed.