Such a place could not go begging for tenants, but for some reason it had been vacant for five or six weeks, when Godfrey’s telegram was received, bidding Perry get it in readiness for Mrs. Rogers. As we have seen, Perry obeyed orders, and, in spite of the wry faces of the young ladies and Miss Christine’s remonstrance, he collected the articles named in Colonel Schuyler’s dispatch, and carried them to the cottage, where I found them scattered about promiscuously, a half-worn velvet carpet here, a marble table and stand there, and in another place a beautiful rosewood bedstead, bearing the marks of the boy Godfrey’s jack-knife, and a handsome bureau, both too tall to stand in any room except the parlor, where they were not wanted.
“What is all this?” I asked, as I stepped over oil-cloth, and hearth-rug, and curtains. “Who is going to live here?”
“A Mrs. Rogers, cousin to the new madame’s waiting-maid,” Perry replied, with a certain intonation in his voice, which showed me that he had taken his cue from the house on the Hill, and was not inclined to regard with favor the cousin of “madame’s waiting-maid.”
“When is Mrs. Rogers expected?” I asked, and he replied:
“She may come any time, but the colonel will not be here for two weeks or more. There’s the old Harry to pay up there,” and he nodded toward the house on the Hill. “I tell you, Miss Rossiter and Miss Schuyler is ridin’ their highest horses.”
It was not for me to question him, and so I made him no reply, but improved the opportunity of going through the house where my old friend, Heloise Fordham, used to live, and where I had bidden her good-by with promises to care for that grave on the hillside. And I had cared for it regularly at first, and then as years went by and she neither came to see my work nor sent me any word, I gradually began to grow a little lax in my labors, and now it was months since I had thought of it. But I remembered it that morning when I stood in Heloise’s old room, where I had seen her with the tears in her eyes and the tremor in her voice as she talked to me of Abelard, who “was not her beau,” and yet very dear to her. There by the window she had stood and cut the long curl of hair and given me the vase for Abelard’s grave.
“And where is the young girl?” I asked myself, “and why has she never written me a line in all these years?”
Then as I thought of the neglected grave, I said, aloud:
“I’ll go there to-morrow and see what I can do. It must be sadly overgrown by this time.”
But it rained the next day and the next, and so I did not go, but came each day by the cottage, where at last I saw the new tenants, Mrs. Rogers and little Gertie Westbrooke.