She had, indeed, said it before, scores of times.
“Well, give me more time, then,” she replied.
“How much?” asked the old man, in a matter-of-fact way.
“Oh, I don’t know! Long enough for me to make up my mind.”
Thus far, this conversation had followed in the 258 exact lines of many that had preceded it, but now Mr. Valentine made a departure from the customary form.
“I think,” said he, “if my other two wives had taken as long as you to make up their minds, I shouldn’t have been twice a widower by now.”
“Oh, Mr. Valentine!” said Miss Sally, in a sweetly reproachful way. “Now you know—”
But he cut her speech off short. “Very likely,” said he. “I don’t know. Well, take your time. Only please remember I haven’t so very much time left! Better take me while I’m here to be had! Good night, ma’am!” And he went to the dining-room to fortify himself for his long homeward walk through the snow.
In crossing the hall, he saw Cuff on the settle in Sam’s place. In the dining-room he met Molly, who was clearing the table of the supper that Colden had disdained. He asked her the whereabouts of Williams, and she replied that the steward and Sam had gone out on some order of Miss Elizabeth’s. Deciding to await Williams’s return, the old man sat down before the dining-room fire, and was soon peacefully snoring.
Elizabeth had gone up-stairs to watch from her darkened window the issue of the expedition of Williams and Sam, who had gone out by the kitchen, equipped respectively with rope and pistol. While 259 they were in the immediate vicinity of the house, she could not see them from her elevation, but presently she beheld them glide swiftly across a white open space in the garden, cross a stile, and disappear among the trees and bushes between the garden and the post-road. Turning her eyes to the road itself, that lonely highway now called Broadway,[9] she made out a solitary figure toiling forward through the whirling whiteness,—and she gave a sigh, the deepest and longest with which her frame had ever trembled.