ctance, the things of night at length crept
forth. Jinnie felt some of them as they touched her hands, her face,
and moved on. One of the countless birds fluttered low, as if
frightened at the advancing dark, brushed her cheek, then winged on
and up and was lost in the tree above her. Somewhere deep in the gloom
shrouding the little graveyard came the ghostly flutter of an owl.
Jinnie was flat on her back, and how long she lay thus she could never
afterward remember, but it was until the stars appeared and the moon
formed queer fantastic pictures, like frost upon a window pane. In
solemn review passed the days,--from that awful night when she had
left her father dead upon the floor in the house nearby to the present
moment. She glanced at the windows. They looked back at her like
square, darkening eyes.
She wondered dully how that wee star away off there could blink so
peacefully in its nightly course when just below it beat a heart that
hurt like hers. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again,
long black fingers were drawing dark pictures across the sky. A drop
of rain fell upon her face, but still she did not move. Then, like
rows of soldiers, the low clouds drew slowly together, and the stars
softly wept themselves out.
Suddenly, from the other side of the lake, the thunder rolled up, and
with the distant boom came the thought of Lafe's infinite faith, and
the memory fell upon Jinnie like a benediction from God's dark sky.
She arose from the grass, took the fiddle box and bag, and walked to
the porch. She went in through the broken door. It was dark, too dark
to see much, and from the leather case she took a box of matches and a
candle. Memories crowded down upon her thick and fast. In the kitchen,
which was bare, she could mark the place where Matty used to sit and
where her own chair had been.
The long stairs that led from the basement to the upper floor yawned
black in the gloom. Candle and fiddle in hand, Jinnie mounted them and
halted before the unopened door. Somehow it seemed as if she would
find before the grate the long, thin body of her dead father, and she
distinctly remembered the spindle fire-flames falling in golden yellow
licks upon his face. In her imagination she could again see the
flake-like ashes, thrown out from the smoldering fire, rise grey to
the ceiling, then descend silently over him like a pale shroud.
After this hesitation, she slowly turned the handle of the door an
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