"What did I tell you? Up and gone at this time! Fine doings these, I must say! Oh, I knowed it by the way he spunked up last night when I jest was giving him a hint to look out for her. I tell ye no such woman as that sets her foot in these doors; no, not if he laws on it. I tell ye——"
"Did you want me, mother?" asked Homer, showing himself at the stable-door, curry-comb and brush in hand.
"Oh, you're there, be ye?" said his mother, with a gasp of surprise.
"Yes," said Homer; "do you want me?"
"No; oh, no. I was just looking at the morning," said his mother, and vanished.
"Just got back in time," soliloquized Homer, contemptuously, as he went back to his work.
Left alone, Myron Holder stood a moment motionless. Then she took a few steps forward, into the shadow of the bush that but lately had held for her such cruel delusion. The mists of the morning that still lingered about the bush parted at her passage and clung round her, chill shreds of vapor.
The evanescent flush died out of her face; her eyes were dazed with pain—she locked her hands (stained with the rust of the windlass chain) and wrung them cruelly; now she pressed her quivering lips together—now they parted in shuddering respirations. How many tides of hope had swelled within her heart! How stony were the shores on which they had spent themselves! How salt the memory of their floods! But never a wave of them all had risen so high as this one, which had swept her forward to the very haven of hope only to leave her fast upon the sands of despair.
She looked from side to side, with pitiable helplessness in her eyes, over the desolate garden. Each bush seemed a mocking sentinel appointed to watch her misery; nay, to her stricken heart each seemed the abiding place of some new cheat that in time would issue forth to delude and torture her. Unfailing tears gathered in her eyes; she let her face fall in her hands and breathed forth a name—
"Like the yearning cry of some bewildered bird
Above an empty nest";