hand upon the clue.

She locked up the manuscript and sat down to wait. If a pilgrim had come
just then the priestess would have fallen on his neck; but she continued
to celebrate her rites alone. It was a double solitude; for she had always
thought a great deal more of the people who came to see the House than of
the people who came to see her. She fancied that the neighbors kept a keen
eye on the path to the House; and there were days when the figure of a
stranger strolling past the gate seemed to focus upon her the scorching
sympathies of the village. For a time she thought of travelling; of going
to Europe, or even to Boston; but to leave the House now would have
seemed like deserting her post. Gradually her scattered energies centred
themselves in the fierce resolve to understand what had happened. She was
not the woman to live long in an unmapped country or to accept as final
her private interpretation of phenomena. Like a traveller in unfamiliar
regions she began to store for future guidance the minutest natural signs.
Unflinchingly she noted the accumulating symptoms of indifference that
marked her grandfather's descent toward posterity. She passed from the
heights on which he had been grouped with the sages of his day to the lower
level where he had come to be "the friend of Emerson," "the correspondent
of Hawthorne," or (later still) "the Dr. Anson" mentioned in their letters.
The change had taken place as slowly and imperceptibly as a natural
process. She could not say that any ruthless hand had stripped the leaves
from the tree: it was simply that, among the evergreen glories of his
group, her grandfather's had proved deciduous.

She had still to ask herself why. If the decay had been a natural process,
was it not the very pledge of renewal? It was easier to find such arguments
than to be convinced by them. Again and again she tried to drug her
solicitude with analogies; but at last she saw that such expedients were