It was only when all living love had failed her that she returned to the
dead. She had gathered the letters of nearly sixty years ago from the
bottom of the cedar chest, reading them through her spectacles with
bleared, watery eyes. Those subtle sentimentalities which linger like
aromas in a heart too aged for passion were liberated by the bundle of
yellow scrawls written by hands that were dust. As she sat in her stiff
bombazine skirts beside the opened chest, peering with worry-ravaged
face at the old letters, she forgot that she was no longer one with the
girl in the muslin frock, and that the inciter of this exuberant emotion
was as dead as the emotion itself.

When the dresses were brought up to her she would put them on again and
go down to flinch before kindly eyes and to make embittered speeches in
her high, shrill voice. Outwardly she grew more soured and more
eccentric. On mild summer evenings she would come down stairs with her
head wrapped in a pink knitted "nubia," and stroll back and forth along
the gravelled walk, her gaunt figure passing into the dusk of the cedar
avenue and emerging like the erratic shadow of one of the sombre trees.

Sometimes Eugenia joined her, but Bernard, her favourite, held shyly
aloof. In her exercise she seldom spoke, and her words were peevish
ones, but there was grim pathos in her carriage as she moved slowly back
and forth between the straight rows of box.

After supper the family assembled on the porch and talked in a desultory
way until ten o'clock, when the lights were put out and the house
retired to rest. Eugenia slept in a great, four-post bedstead with Aunt
Chris, and the bed was so large and soft and billowy that she seemed to
lose herself suddenly at night in its lavender-scented midst, and to be
as suddenly discovered in the morning by Rindy, the house-girl, when she