“I wonder why my thoughts run so on Jack and Bessie to-day,” she soliloquized, fixing the end of the knitting-needle into the leather sheath at her side. “I wish I knew how they are. It's my opinion they'd have done as well to stay here. I don't think much of that machinery business.”
The coming event which had thus cast its shadow before, was already at the gate, or, more literally, at the bars. Bessie Maynard had walked alone up the road she had not trodden for years, and now stood leaning there, and looking about with eyes that were at once eager and shrinking. Her face was pale, her mouth tightly closed; she had grown taller, and her appearance disclosed in some indefinable way a capacity for sternness which would scarcely have been suspected, or even credited, in the girl of twenty we left her. A glance would show that she had suffered deeply.
Presently, as she gazed, tears began to dim her eyes. She brushed them away, let down the slim cedar pole that barred her passage, stepped through, replaced the bar, and walked up the path to the house.
The knitter in the chimney-corner heard the sound of advancing steps, and sat still, with her face turned over her shoulder, to watch the door. The steps reached the threshold and paused there, and for a moment the two women gazed at each other—the one silent from astonishment, the other struggling to repress some emotion that rose again to the surface.
The visitor was the first to recover her self-possession. She came in smiling, and held out her hands.
“Haven't you a word of welcome for me, Aunt Nancy?” she asked.
Her voice broke the spell, and the old woman started up with a true country welcome, hearty, and rather rough. It was many a year since Bessie Maynard's hands had felt such a grasp, or her arms such a shake.
“But where is Jack?” asked his aunt, looking toward the door over Bessie's shoulder.
“Oh! he's at home,” was the reply, rather negligently given. “But how are you, Aunt Nancy? Have you room for me to stay awhile? I took a fancy to be quiet a little while this summer. The city is so hot and noisy.”
The old lady repeated her welcomes, mingled with many apologies for the kind of accommodations she [pg 220] had to offer, all the while helping to remove her visitor's bonnet and shawl, drawing up the rocking-chair for her, and pressing her into it.