When they were before the blazing wood fire, Margaret unfastened Isabelle's long cloak and they stood, both in black, pale in the firelight, and looked at each other, then embraced without a word.
"I wanted to come," Isabelle said at last when she was settled into the old arm-chair beside the fire, "when you first wrote. But I was too ill. I seemed to have lost not only strength but will to move…. It's good to be here."
"They are the nicest people, these Shorts! He's a wheelwright and blacksmith, and she used to teach school. It's all very plain, like one of our mountain places in Virginia; but it's heavenly peaceful—removed. You'll feel in a day or two that you have left everything behind you, down there below!"
"And the children?"
"They are splendidly. And Ned is really getting better—the doctor has worked a miracle for the poor little man. We think it won't be long now before he can walk and do what the others do. And he is happy. He used to have sullen fits,—resented his misfortune just like a grown person. He's different now!"
There was a buoyant note in Margaret's deep tones. Pale as she was in her black dress and slight,—"the mere spirit of a woman," as Falkner had called her,—there was a gentler curve to the lips, less chafing in the sunken eyes.
'I suppose it is a great relief,' thought Isabelle,—'Larry's death, even with all its horror,—she can breathe once more, poor Margaret!'
"Tell me!" she said idly, as Margaret wheeled the lounge to the fire for Isabelle to rest on; "however did you happen to come up here to the land's end in Vermont—or is it Canada?"
"Grosvenor is just inside the line…. Why, it was the doctor—Dr. Renault, you know, the one who operated on Ned. I wanted to be near him. It was in July after Larry's death that we came, and I haven't been away since. And I shall stay, always perhaps, at least as long as the doctor can do anything for the little man. And for me…. I like it. At first it seemed a bit lonesome and far away, this tiny village shut in among the hills, with nobody to talk to. But after a time you come to see a lot just here in this mite of a village. One's glasses become adjusted, as the doctor says, and you can see what you have never taken the time to see before. There's a stirring world up here on Grosvenor Flat! And the country is so lovely,—bigger and sterner than my old Virginia hills, but not unlike them."
"And why does your wonderful doctor live out of the world like this?"