So the night passed.
“My dear,” Aunt Anne asked, opening her eyes, “is it morning yet?”
“Yes,” Mrs. North answered tenderly, “and a lovely morning. The sun is shining, and a thrush is singing on the tree outside. We will open the window presently, and let the summer in.” An hour passed, and the postman came, but he brought no news of those who were expected. Later on the doctor looked in, and said her pulse was weaker.
“She must live a little longer,” Mrs. North said, in despair; “she must, indeed.”
“I will come again this afternoon,” he said; “perhaps she may have a little rally.”
While Aunt Anne dozed and the maid watched, Mrs. North, unable to sit quietly any longer, wandered up and down the house, and round the little drawing-room, bending her face over the pot-pourri on the corner cupboard, opening the piano and looking at the yellow keys she did not venture to touch. And then, restlessly, she went into the garden, and gathered some oak and beech boughs, with the fresh young leaves upon them, and put them in pots, as Aunt Anne had once done for the home-coming of Florence.
“I cannot feel that she is going to die,” she thought, “but rather as if she were going to meet the people she knew long ago; it will be a festival for them.” She looked down the road, and strained her ears, but there was no sound of a carriage, no sign of Walter and Florence. She could hardly realize that she was watching for the Hibberts and that Aunt Anne upstairs lay dying. “It is all such a tangle,” she said to herself, “life and death, and joy and sorrow, and which is best it is difficult to say.” Aunt Anne’s little breakfast was ready, and she carried it up herself, and lovingly watched the old lady trying to swallow a spoonful.
“You look a little better again, Aunt Anne.”
“Yes, love; and I shall be much better when I have seen those dear children. I am not quite happy about my will. I wanted you to have some remembrance of me.”
“Give me something,” Mrs. North said, “something you have worn; I shall like that better than a legacy, because I shall have it from your own two living hands.”