if the firelight were printing it all over the walls for me
to read. And then I had risen up between them, and here I stood between
them now, when all their mistakes had been cleared up, and all their old
feelings revived. Well, I would not be in their way. I would go away
from Hillsboro'.

I crept over to the fire, drew the embers together, and watched them
waning and dying in the grate. I no longer told myself that I should get
over it. I knew that I should not die, or go mad, nor do anything that
people could talk about; but deep in my heart I knew that here was a
sorrow that would go with me to my grave. I felt that I was not a girl
to put my foot on the memory of it, and go out into the world again to
be wooed and won afresh. I knew that the spring of my days were going to
end in winter. Then I thought of how I had turned my back upon the whole
world, all the world that I knew, to follow my mother's friends to
Hillsbro'; how I had loved them, how I had given my whole heart and
faith to John; how trusting, how satisfied, how happy I had been. At
last my heart swelled up in softer grief, and I wept with my face buried
in my arms where I lay upon the hearth-rug. And so after long grieving I
sobbed myself to sleep, and wakened in the dark, towards morning,
shuddering with cold in my thin dress.

The next day I was ill with a feverish cold, and Rachel tended me. Never
was there a nurse more tender, more patient, more attentive. I was not
at all so ill as to require constant watching, but she hovered about my
bed, applying remedies, tempting me with dainties, changing my pillows,
shifting the blinds so as to keep the room cheerful, yet save my burning
eyes from the light. She would not be coaxed away from me even for an
hour. Mrs. Hill, though kind and sympathetic herself, in a different
way, was dissatisfied, I think. There were other guests, and she was a
lady who took the duties of hospitality seriously to heart. But Rachel,
charming, even when provoking, knew how to manage her adopted mother.
There were whispered discussions between them, of which I, lying with
closed eyes, was supposed to know nothing, and then Rachel would steal
her graceful arm round Mrs. Hill's portly waist, and kiss her, and put
her out of the room. Mrs. Hill was very good to me, and scrupulously
left her poodle dog on the mat outside the door when she came to visit
me; but her vocation was not for waiting in sick-rooms.

Rachel, soft-voiced,