“Are you going to the dépôt?” asked his sister, as he was leaving the room.
“No, no, no,” he replied, and then as Charlie again bade me come, I rose bewildered to my feet, hardly realizing when Mrs. Lansing, Ada and Lina bade me adieu.
Halbert went with me in the carriage, and together with Charlie looked wonderingly at me, as I unconsciously repeated in a whisper, “My Rose I once hoped to call you. It is Ada who stands in the way,” I said to myself, and covering my face with my veil, I wept as I thought of all I had lost when Richard Delafield offered his heart to another. He did love me. I was sure of that, but what did it avail me. He was too honorable to break his engagement with Ada, so henceforth I must walk alone, bearing the burden of an aching heart.
“Oh, I have loved you so much,” said Halbert, winding his arms about my neck—“loved you as I shall never love another teacher,” and the boy’s tears flowed fast as he bade me good-bye.
One parting glance at Cedar Grove, one last lingering look at Sunny Bank, one thought of Jessie’s grave, and then the hissing engine shot out into the woods, leaving them all behind. Leaning back on Charlie’s arm and drawing my veil over my face, I thought how impossible it was that I should ever visit that spot again.
In the meantime a far different scene was being enacted in the apartment I had just vacated. Scarcely had the whistle of the engine died away in the distance, when a troop of blacks, armed with boiling suds and scrubbing-brushes, entered my chamber for the purpose of cleaning it. They had carried from it nearly every article of furniture, and nothing remained save the matting and the bureau, the latter of which they were about to remove when they were surprised at the unexpected appearance of Mr. Delafield, who could not resist the strong desire which he felt to stand once more in the room where Rose had spent so many weary weeks. For a moment the blacks suspended their employment, and then Linda, who seemed to be leading, took hold of the bureau, giving one end of it a shove towards the centre of the room. The movement dislodged the long lost letter, which, covered with dirt and cobwebs, fell upon the floor, at her feet. She was the same woman who, weeks before, had carelessly knocked off the letter, which she now picked up and handed to Mr. Delafield, saying, as she wiped off the dirt, “It must have laid thar a heap of a while, and now I think on’t, ‘pears like ever so long ago, when I was breshin’ the bureau, I hearn somethin’ done drap, but I couldn’t find nothin’, and it must have been this.”
Glancing at the superscription, and recognizing the handwriting of Dr. Clayton, Mr. Delafield broke the seal, and read! From black to white—from white to red—from red to speckled—and from speckled back again to its natural color, grew his face as he proceeded, while his eyes grew so dazzlingly bright with the intensity of his feelings that the negroes, who watched him, whispered among themselves that he “must be gwine stark mad.”
His active, quick-seeing mind took in the meaning of each sentence, and even before he had finished the letter he understood everything just as it was—why Rose had appeared so strangely when she read Dr. Clayton’s letter to herself, and realized perfectly what her feelings must have been as day after day went by and he still “made no sign.”