for the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through hours
of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England
girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about
him so that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;--
all, but it served.
It carried her through weary months of nursing--nursing of other
soldiers for Tom's dear sake; it sent her home a better woman;
and though she had never left Riverboro in all the years that lay
between, and had grown into the counterfeit presentment of her
sister and of all other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it
was something of a counterfeit, and underneath was still the
faint echo of that wild heartbeat of her girlhood. Having learned
the trick of beating and loving and suffering, the poor faithful
heart persisted, although it lived on memories and carried on its
sentimental operations mostly in secret.
"You're soft, Jane," said Miranda once; "you allers was soft, and
you allers will be. If't wa'n't for me keeping you stiffened up,
I b'lieve you'd leak out o' the house into the dooryard."
It was already past the appointed hour for Mr. Cobb and his coach
to be lumbering down the street.
"The stage ought to be here," said Miranda, glancing nervously at
the tall clock for the twentieth time. "I guess everything's
done. I've tacked up two thick towels back of her washstand and
put a mat under her slop-jar; but children are awful hard on
furniture. I expect we sha'n't know this house a year from now."
Jane's frame of mind was naturally depressed and timorous, having
been affected by Miranda's gloomy presages of evil to come. The
only difference between the sisters in this matter was that while
Miranda only wondered how they could endure Rebecca, Jane had
flashes of inspiration in which she wondered how Rebecca would