There was an acute silence, broken by the pine-logs crackling higher in the fireplace.
Mattie put her hands across her eyes to shield them from the blaze.
“It was,” she whispered.
The fire died down again. We waited. But she said no more. After a while she rose, as if weary of her own thoughts, and said she would go up now to her room. At the doorway she turned back to us.
“Only I never intended to tell you,” she faltered. “I never meant it to go so far, not so far as that. That was what I didn’t want you to know.”
So we always pretended that we did not know.
The part that Jezebel played was one of those coincidences of life which make of tragedy a greater drama in the living than the presentation of it can ever be.
If you are ever in Star Harbor the House of the Five Pines will be pointed out to you as one of the show places.
There is a high, well trimmed box-hedge along the street, but if you look through the gate you will see the wide, close-cut lawn, with its old-fashioned rose-garden and the sun-dial on one side, and on the other the children’s playground, with the slide and the seesaw and the little fountain they love for the birds’ bath. The flagging to the green-shuttered portal is just as it used to be, but both the doors with their brass knockers stand wide open. Against the clean white house hollyhocks paint their gay faces and lean upon the kitchen lovingly. Ruffled dotted-muslin curtains at all the square-paned windows show that people live within to whom no detail of housekeeping is too much trouble. You cannot see the garage that has been built beneath the captain’s wing in place of the “under” filled with rubbish, but if you will walk along the back street, after you have finished staring in from the front, you will notice the driveway that curves past the new entrance cut in the rear, behind the hall, and you will see the playhouse made out of a boat. The children will be there, romping, taking turns riding their old hand-made rocking-horse; and the loving arbiter of all their quarrels is that little gray-haired woman in the soft black dress who sits knitting peacefully in the shadow of the five pines.