“Well, dearie,” said the old woman, who was evidently making preparations to go out, on some mission of her own, “you look as if you too are in need of some of the simples you gathered in the summer.”
“It is nothing simple that I need,” said Garde. “I have come for wisdom and help. Oh, Goody, I don’t know what I shall do. I wish so I had come to you sooner!”
“You must stop trembling first,” said Goody. “Here, take this cup of tea. It is going to be a bitter night.”
She had prepared the drink for herself, to fortify her meager warmth of body against the wind, into which she expected to go on an errand, presently.
“It is not from the cold; it is inside that I am trembling,” confessed the girl. But she took the cup, obediently. “If you can do nothing to help me, I could wish the cold would never let me go back to my home!”
“There, there, drink the tea,” said Goody, after giving her one penetrative glance. For young women to feel that terrible demi-mania of desiring self-destruction was not new to Goody Dune. She had gone through the stages herself. She knew almost exactly the conditions which universally promote the emotion in the young of her sex.
“I know that Adam has never returned,” she said, slowly. “You have had no word, even. I have seen that in your eyes. But, dear me, have you no abiding faith and hope, child? In the spring——”
“Oh it isn’t that, Goody!” broke in Garde. “I could wait—I could wait for him fifty years, patiently—yes, patiently. I love him. But you don’t know what has happened. I have never told you. What was the use! They made me promise;—and if Adam knew—he might never come back. No—he would not come back. And I love even the very places where his shadow fell, in the forest—and the log he was sitting on. I love the gate where his hands rested—I love everything he ever touched!” Her hands pressed upon her bosom, where, beneath her frock, she wore the brooch from Hispaniola.
Goody had never seen her in such a mood. She had never heard such passion from her lips. But by the memory of her own heart-break, she caught at the sinister cry of something promised.
“And have you given yourself in promise to somebody else?” she asked, quietly, but somewhat severely.