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HAT afternoon, for Cynthia Porter, dragged slowly along. The quilt was finished, duly admired, and laid away. The visiting girls put on their sun-bonnets about four o'clock and went home. No further news had come from the village in regard to the impending duel, and each girl hurried away in the fluttering hope that she would be the first to hear of the outcome.
Fifty times during the remainder of the afternoon Cynthia went to the front-door to see if any one was passing from whom she might hear what had happened, but the road leading by the house was not a main-travelled one, and she saw only the shadows fall in advance of the long twilight and heard the dismal lowing of the cows as they swaggered homeward from the pasture. Then it was night, and with the darkness a great weight descended on her young heart that nothing could lift.
The simple supper was over by eight o'clock. Her father and mother retired to their room, and she went, perforce, to hers. Outside the still night, with its pitiless moonlight, seemed to be a vast, breathless thing under the awful consciousness of tragedy, deeper than the mere mystery of the grave. Dead! Nelson Floyd dead! How impossible a thing it seemed, and yet how could it be otherwise? She threw herself on her bed without undressing, and lay there staring at her flickering tallow-dip and its yellow, beckoning ghost in her tilted mirror. Suddenly she heard a step in the hall. It was a faint, shuffling one, accompanied by the soft slurring of a hand cautiously sliding along the wall. The girl sat up on the bed wonderingly, and then the door was softly opened and her grandmother came in, and with bent form advanced to her.
“Sh!” the old woman said, raising a warning hand. “I don't want your ma and pa to know I came here, darling. They wouldn't understand it. But I had to come; I couldn't sleep.”
“Oh, granny, you oughtn't to be up this way!” exclaimed Cynthia. “You know it is long past your bedtime.”
“I know that, honey, I know that,” said the old woman; “but to be late once in a while won't hurt me. Besides, as I said, I couldn't sleep, anyway, and so I came in to you. I knew you were wide awake—I felt that. You see, honey, your ma can't keep anything—even anything she wants to be silent on has to come out, sooner or later, and I discovered what was the matter with you this morning. You see, darling, knowing what your trouble was, old granny felt that it was her duty to try to comfort you all she could.”
“Oh, granny, granny!” cried the girl, covering her face with her hands.