"Hiram," she said, "are you—you do not look well to-day."
"Oh, I am well enough," he replied, shaking her off. "But I have noticed of late that you and Abigail are looking shabby, and I don't choose that all these fine folks shall criticise you." He opened his desk and counted out four double-eagles.
"Will this be enough? I don't know anything about women's things."
Miss Webster was thankful to get any money without days of expostulation, and assured him that it was sufficient. She left the room at once and sought her companion, Miss Williams.
The companion was sitting on the edge of the bed in her small ascetic chamber, staring, like Dr. Webster down-stairs, through the trees at the rain. So she had sat the night of her arrival at Webster Hall, then a girl of eighteen and dreams. So she had sat many times, feeling youth slip by her, lifting her bitter protest against the monotony and starvation of her existence, yet too timid and ignorant to start forth in search of life. It was her birthday, this gloomy Sunday. She was forty-two. She was revolving a problem—a problem she had revolved many times before. For what had she stayed? Had there been an unadmitted hope that these old people must soon die and leave her with an independence with which she could travel and live? She loved Miss Webster, and she had gladly responded to her invitation to leave the New England village, where she was dependent on the charity of relatives, and make her home in the new country. Miss Webster needed a companion and housekeeper; there would be no salary, but a comfortable home and clothes that she could feel she had earned. She had come full of youth and spirit and hope. Youth and hope and spirit had dribbled away, but she had stayed, and stayed. To-day she wished she had married any clod in her native village that had been good enough to address her. Never for one moment had she known the joys of freedom, of love, of individuality.
Miss Webster entered abruptly.
"Abby," she exclaimed, "Hiram is ill." And she related the tale of his unbending.
Miss Williams listened indifferently. She was very tired of Hiram. She accepted with a perfunctory expression of gratitude the gold piece allotted to her. "You are forty-two, you are old, you are nobody," was knelling through her brain.
"What is the matter?" asked Miss Webster, sympathetically; "have you been crying? Don't you feel well? You'd better dress, dear; they'll be here soon."
She sat down suddenly on the bed and flung her arms about her companion, the tears starting to her kindly eyes.