When his traps had been piled again into the carriage, and he said good-bye to his Aunt and to Alvira, no Isabel was to be seen. She had been at breakfast, but had subsequently disappeared. Seth went into the living room—no one was there. He opened the door to the stairs and called out her name—no answer. As he closed the door again, he heard the faintest tinkle imaginable from a piano key. He had not thought of the parlor, which was ordinarily unused, but he hastened to it now. Isabel stood at the instrument, her head bowed; her finger still pressing the key. She turned with a dear little exclamation, which might be either of surprise or satisfied expectancy, and held out her hand.
“So you wouldn’t go, after all, without saying good-bye to me!”
“Why, Isabel, you know better!” answered Seth, still very downright for his years. He was actually pained at her having fancied him capable of such a thing, and while he held her hand, he looked at her with mild reproach in his eyes.
“Oh, do I?” she answered, rather inconsequently. Then she sighed, and bowed her fair head again. “Have you given it a thought at all—how lonely it will be after you are gone for—for those who are left behind? I can’t bear to think of it—I came in here because I couldn’t stand and see the horses at the door, and the preparations for your going. It is as if the tomb door were swinging back on me again. I am foolish, I know—” here the words were much hampered in their flow by incipient sobs—“but if you could realize my position—the awful desolation of it, the—the—” She broke down altogether, and, with the disengaged hand, put her handkerchief to her eyes.
Seth had never seen a young and beautiful woman in tears before, off the stage, but his racial instincts served him in the emergency. He gently took her hand down again, holding them both, now, in his. He told her, again surprising himself by the smoothness and felicity of his words, how delightful she had made his visit, how deeply he prized her sympathy and compassionated her lot, and how the pangs of regret at parting were only solaced by the thought that she had permitted him to write. Then he kissed her—and hurried out to the carriage.
The handsome, high-bitted grays made short work of the drive to Thessaly station, where John was waiting to have a parting word, so that Seth scarcely had time to collect his thoughts and settle accounts with himself, before the train started. Three hours later when he got off at Tecumseh, he had progressed no further in his work of striking a moral balance than:
“After all, she is my cousin as well as my sister-in-law.”