so shut
away from them by a circle of hills that it had a seeming isolation.
Not another house could Miss Hannah see from her own doorstone; she
often declared she could not have borne it if it had not been for the
lighthouse beacon at night flaming over the northwest hill behind the
house like a great unwinking, friendly star that never failed even on
the darkest night. Behind the house a little tongue of the St.
Lawrence gulf ran up between the headlands until the wavelets of its
tip almost lapped against Miss Hannah's kitchen doorstep. Beyond, to
the north, was the great crescent of the gulf, whose murmur had been
Miss Hannah's lullaby all her life. When people wondered to her how
she could endure living in such a lonely place, she retorted that the
loneliness was what she loved it for, and that the lighthouse star and
the far-away call of the gulf had always been company enough for her
and always would be ... until Ralph came back. When Ralph came home,
of course, he might like a livelier place and they might move to town
or up-country as he wished.

"Of course," said Miss Hannah with a proud smile, "a rich man mightn't
fancy living away down here in a little grey house by the shore. He'll
be for building me a mansion, I expect, and I'd like it fine. But
until he comes I must be contented with things as they are."

People always smiled to each other when Miss Hannah talked like this.
But they took care not to let her see the smile.

Miss Hannah snipped her white and purple asters off ungrudgingly and
sang, as she snipped, an old-fashioned song she had learned long ago
in her youth. The day was one of October's rarest, and Miss Hannah
loved fine days. The air was clear as golden-hued crystal, and all the
slopes around her were mellow and hazy in the autumn sunshine. She
knew that beyond those sunny slopes were woods glorying in crimson and
gold, and she would have the delight of a walk through them later on
when she went to carry the asters to sick Millie Starr at the Bridge.
Flowers were all Miss Hannah had to give, for she was very poor, but
she gave them with a great wealth of friendliness and goodwill.

Presently a wagon drove down her lane and pulled up outside of her
white garden paling. Jacob Delancey was in it, with a pretty young
niece of his who was a visitor from the city, and Miss Hannah, her
sheaf of asters in her arms, went over to the paling with a sparkle of
interest in her faded blue eyes. She ha