She rose quietly and folded the paper, with the loving care and lingering delay with which a mother smooths the shroud that wraps her baby. She tied it with a pure white ribbon, so that it looked not unlike a bridal gift; and pressing her lips to it long and silently, she laid it in the old drawer. There it still remained. The paper was as white, the ribbon was as pure as ever. Only the flowers were withered. But her heart was not a flower.
“Well, Aunt Martha,” said she, several months after the death of old Christopher Burt, “I really think you are coming back to this world again.”
The young woman smiled, while the older one busily drove her needle.
“Why,” continued Amy, “here is a white collar; and you have actually smiled at least six times in as many months!”
The older woman still said nothing. The old sadness was in her eyes, but it certainly had become more natural—more human, as it were—and the melodramatic gloom in which she had hitherto appeared was certainly less obvious.
“Amy,” she said at length, “God leads his erring children through the dark valley, but he does lead them—he does not leave them. I did not know how deeply I had sinned until I heard the young man Summerfield, who came to see me even in this room.”
She looked up and about, as if to catch some lingering light upon the wall.
“And it was Lawrence Newt’s preacher who made me feel that there was hope even for me.”
She sewed on quietly.
“I thank God for those two men; and for one other,” she added, after a little pause.