"You're not to get ill, child. I shall make a bottle of tansy bitters to-morrow morning. We've trouble enough in this family without your losing colour and getting circles round your eyes."
That was love and kindness from Old Miss. The water came into Hagar's eyes. She felt a desire to tell her grandmother and Aunt Serena about the letter, but in another moment it was gone. Her whole inner life was by now secret from them, and this seemed of the inner life. Presently, of course, she would deliberately tell them all; she had thought it out and determined that it would be after supper, before Uncle Bob went to bed and grandfather told her to get the chess-table. It seemed so wonderful a thing to her; she was so awed by it that she could not help the feeling that it would be wonderful to them, too.
In the afternoon she put a cape around her, left the home hill and went down the lane, skirted a ploughed field, and, crossing the river road, came immediately to the fringe of sycamores and willows upon the river bank. It was warmer and stiller than it had been in the morning, for the voice of the wind there sounded now the voice of the river; the many boughs above were still against the sky. She made for a great sycamore that she had known from childhood; it had a vast protuberant curving root in whose embrace you could sit as in an armchair. She sat there now and looked at the river that went so swiftly by. It was swollen with the spring rains; it made a deep noise, going by to the distant sea. To Hagar its voice to-day was at once solemn and jubilant, strong and stirred from depth to surface. She had with her the letter; how many times she had read it she could not have told. She could have said it by heart, but still she wanted to read it, to touch it, to become aware of meaning under meaning.... She could write, she could tell stories, she could write books.... She could earn money. It was one of the moments of her life: the moment when she knew of her mother's death—the moment when she changed Gilead Balm for Eglantine—the moment by the fire, Christmas eve—this moment. She was but eighteen; the right-angled turns in her road of this life had not been many; this was one and a main one. Suddenly, to herself, her life achieved purpose, direction. It was as though a rudderless boat had been suddenly mended, or a bewildered helmsman had seen the pole star.
She sat in the embrace of the sycamore, her feet lightly resting on the spring earth, her shoulders just touching the pale bark of the tree, her arms folded, her eyes level; poised, recollected as a young Brahman, conscious of an expanded space, a deeper time. How long she sat there she did not know; the sun slipped lower, touched her knees with gold. She sighed at last, raised her hands and turned her body.
What, perhaps, had roused her was the sound of a horse's hoofs upon the river road. At any rate, she now marked a black horse coming in the distance, down the road, by the speckled sycamores. It came on with a gay sound upon the wind-dried earth, and in its rider she presently recognized her cousin, Ralph Coltsworth.
"What are you doing here?" she asked when he reined in the black horse beside her. "Why aren't you at the University with Blackstone under your arm?"
He dismounted, fastened his horse, and came across to the sycamore root. "It's big enough for two, isn't it?" he asked, and sat down facing her. "You mentioned the University? The University, bless its old heart! doesn't appreciate me."
"Ralph! Have you been expelled?"
"Suspended." Hands behind head, he regarded first the blue sky behind the interlaced bare branches, then the tall and great gnarled trunk, then the brown-clad figure of his cousin, enthroned before him. "The suspense," he said, "is exquisite."
"What did you do?"