moon. The moon
itself was not visible from where she sat, for the window faced
north, but she could see over everything the sweet influence of it.
There was no snow on the lawn, which was a dry crisp of frost-killed
grass, as flat as if swept by a broom, and here and there were the
faintest patches and mottles of silver from this moon, aside from a
broad gleam of the garish light from the street-lamp. The bushes and
trees showed lines of silver. The moon was so young that the stars
were quite brilliant. Taking all the lights together--the electric
light in the street, the new moon, and the stars--the lawn was quite
visible, and even, because the leaves were now all gone from the
trees, the road for quite a distance beyond. Charlotte had a
considerable vista in which to watch for her father. The time passed
incredibly in this watching. She had upon her such a fear and even
premonition that he might not come, that the minutes passed with the
horrible swiftness that they pass for a criminal awaiting execution.
The first time she slipped out in the dining-room--with a last look
at the lawn and road, to be sure that he would not be there in the
mean time--to see what time it was by the clock on the shelf, she was
amazed. It was already eight o'clock. She had not dreamed it was more
than half-past seven. She crept back to her place by the parlor
window, with the feeling that much of her time of reprieve had
passed, and that she was so much the nearer the certainty of
tribulation. Instead of impatience she had rather the desire to defer
approaching disaster. While she watched, she had less and less hope
that her father would come on that train, and yet she kept her heart
alive by picturing her rapture when she should see his tall, dark
figure enter the lawn path, when she should run and unlock and unbar
the door and throw her arms around his neck. She made up her mind
that she should not confess to him what a panic she had been in
because of his non-arrival. She planned how she would run and set the
dinner, in which she still believed, on the table, and how hungry he
would be for it. She was quite sure that her poor father did not in
these days provide himself with sumptuous lunches in the city. But
all the time she reared these air-castles, she saw for a certainty
the dark sky of her trouble through them. For some premonition, or a
much modified form of prophecy, the rudimentary expression of a
divine sense in reality exists.