“Dear old home,” she said, with a little sob, and Hale, still silent, drew her to him.
“You were never coming back again?”
“I was never coming back again.” She clutched his arm fiercely as though even now something might spirit him away, and she clung to him, while he hitched the horses and while they walked up the path.
“Why, the garden is just as I left it! The very same flowers in the very same places!” Hale smiled.
“Why not? I had Uncle Billy do that.”
“Oh, you dear—you dear!”
Her little room was shuttered tight as it always had been when she was away, and, as usual, the front door was simply chained on the outside. The girl turned with a happy sigh and looked about at the nodding flowers and the woods and the gleaming pool of the river below and up the shimmering mountain to the big Pine topping it with sombre majesty.
“Dear old Pine,” she murmured, and almost unconsciously she unchained the door as she had so often done before, stepped into the dark room, pulling Hale with one hand after her, and almost unconsciously reaching upward with the other to the right of the door. Then she cried aloud:
“My key—my key is there!”
“That was in case you should come back some day.”