It brought a little homesick ache into the girl’s throat; it set her lips to curving––made her eyes go damp with pity and tenderness for the little white-haired figure bending over his bench. He had clung so bravely, so stubbornly, to that battered bit of a house; to his garden which he had never realized had long since ceased to be anything but a plot of waist-high bushes and weeds. Once when she recollected those countless rows of poignantly wistful faces on the shelves of that back-room workshop she wondered if she had not been disloyal, after all. And she had argued it out with herself aloud as she went from task to task in that afternoon’s gathering twilight.
“But it was because of her that he stayed,” she reassured herself. “It was because of her that he kept it, all these years. And––and so he couldn’t mind––not very much, I think, now that they don’t need it any longer, if I sold it so that I could keep this place––for him!”
They had been long, those hours of waiting. Not a minute of those entire two days since Old Jerry’s departure but had dragged by on laggard feet. And yet now, with nightfall of that third day she became 298 jealous of every passing minute. She hated to have them pass; dreaded to watch the creeping hands of the clock on the kitchen wall as they drew up, little by little, upon that hour which meant the arrival of the night train in the village.
One moment she wondered if he would come––wondered and touched dry lips with the tip of her tongue. And the very next, when somehow she was so very, very sure that there was no room for doubt, she even wondered whether or not he would be glad––glad to find her there. The gaunt skeleton of a framework showing through the torn sides of John Anderson’s cottage almost unnerved her whenever that thought came, and sent her out again into the lighted back room.
“What if he isn’t?” she whispered, over and over again. “Why, I––I never thought of that before, did I? I just thought I had to be here when he came. But what if he––isn’t glad?”
An hour earlier, when the thought had first come to her, she had carried a big, square package out to the table before the kitchen window and untied with fluttering fingers the string that bound it. The little scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt, alive with tinsel that glinted under the light, still lay there beside the thin-heeled slippers and filmy silk stockings. She bent over them, patting them lovingly with a slim hand, her eyes velvety dark while she considered.
“Oh, you’re pretty––pretty––pretty!” she said in a childishly hushed voice, “the prettiest things in the world!”
The next instant she straightened to scan soberly the old shiny black skirt she was wearing, and the darned stockings and cracked shoes.
“And––and you would help, I think,” she went on musing. “I know you would, but then––then it wouldn’t be me. It would be easy for any one to care for you––almost too easy. I––I think I’ll wear them for him––some other time, maybe––if he wants me to.”