The still, hot morning stretched interminably before her. A dozen times it was on her lips to order the trunks brought down from the garret. A dozen times some undefined sense of fitness held her back. When his answer came, when he actually said the word—then; but not till then…. What time was it? After eleven! She would go into the garden, where she could look down the road and have the first glimpse of Eddy Minns climbing the hill. With her thoughts in galloping confusion, she put on her flat hat with its twist of white lace about the crown, and went out into the heat. From the bench under the big poplar she looked across at the girdling hills, blue and hot in the still flood of noon; below her was the valley, now a sea of treetops islanded with Old Chester roofs and chimneys; there was no gleam of the river through the midsummer foliage. She took her watch out of the little watch-pocket at her waist—nearly twelve! If he had got the despatch at nine, it was surely time for an answer. Still, so many things might have happened to delay it. He might have been late in getting to his office; or, for that matter, Eddy Minns might be slow about coming up the hill. Everybody was slow in Old Chester!
The empty road ran down to the foot of the hill, no trudging messenger climbed its hot slope. Twelve.
"I'll not look at the road for five minutes," she told herself, resolutely, and sat staring at the watch open in her hand. Five minutes later she snapped the lid shut, and looked. Blazing, unbroken sunshine. "It ought to have been here by this time," she thought with a tightening of her lips. Perhaps he was away? Her heart sank at that; but how absurd! Suppose he was. What did a few hours' waiting amount to? She had waited thirteen years.
For another hour she watched in the heat and silence of the garden; then started to hear Sarah, at her elbow, saying that dinner was on the table.
"Very well," she answered impatiently. "I'll wait another five minutes," she said to herself. But she waited ten. When she sat down in the dining-room, she ate almost nothing. Once she asked Sarah if she knew how long it took for a despatch to come from Philadelphia to Old Chester. Sarah gaped at the question, and said she didn't know as she'd ever heard.
In the afternoon, with covert glances out of the window, she kept indoors and tried to put her mind on practical things: the arrangements with her landlord for cancelling the lease; the packing and shipping of furniture. At last, on a sudden impulse, she said to herself that she would go and meet David as he came home from school—and call at the telegraph-office.
In the post-office, where the telegraph bound Old Chester to the outer world, Mrs. Minns, looking up from her knitting, saw the tense face at the delivery window.
"No letters for you, Mrs. Richie," she said; then she remembered the telegram that had by this time interested all Old Chester, and got up and came forward, sympathetically curious. "Well'm; I suppose there's a good deal of dyin' this time of year?"
"Have you a despatch for me?" Mrs. Richie said curtly.
"No'm;" said Mrs. Minns.