She gave me a chair by the candle-stand and sat near me and looked into my face with a smile of satisfaction.  In a moment she pointed toward the west with that forefinger, which in my presence had cut down her enemy, and whispered the one word: 

“News?”

I told all that I had heard from home and of my life in Cobleskill but observed, presently, a faraway look in her eyes and judged that she was not hearing me.  Again she whispered: 

“Sally?”

“She has been at school in Albany for a year,” I said.  “She is at home now and I am going to see her.”

“You love Sally?” she whispered.

“Better than I love my life.”

Again she whispered:  “Get married!”

“We hope to in 1844.  I have agreed to meet her by the big pine tree on the river bank at eleven o’clock the third of June, 1844.  We are looking forward to that day.”

A kind of shadow seemed to come out of her spirit and rest upon her face and for a moment she looked very solemn.  I suppose that she divined the meaning of all that.  She shook her head and whispered: 

“Money thirst!”

A tall, slim woman entered the room then and said that supper was ready.  Kate rose with a smile and I followed her into the dining-room where two tables were spread.  One had certain dishes on it and a white cover, frayed and worn.  She led me to the other table which was neatly covered with snowy linen.  The tall woman served a supper on deep, blue china, cooked as only they could cook in old New England.  Meanwhile I could hear the voice of the aged squire—­a weird, empty, inhuman voice it was, utterly cut off from his intelligence.  It came out of the troubled depths of his misery.

So that house—­the scene of his great sin which would presently lie down with him in the dust—­was flooded, a hundred times a day, by the unhappy spirit of its master.  In the dead of the night I heard its despair echoing through the silent chambers.

Kate said little as we ate, or as we sat together in the shabby, great room after supper, but she seemed to enjoy my talk and I went into the details of my personal history.  How those years of suffering and silence had warped her soul and body in a way of speaking!  They were a poor fit in any company now.  Her tongue had lost its taste for speech I doubt not; her voice was gone, although I had heard a low plaintive murmur in the words “my boy.”

The look of her face, even while I was speaking, indicated that her thoughts wandered restlessly, in the gloomy desert of her past.  I thought of that gay bird—­like youth of hers of which the old man with the scythe had told me and wondered.  As I was thinking of this there came a cry from the aged squire so loud and doleful that it startled me and I turned and looked toward the open door.

Kate rose and came to my side and leaning toward my ear whispered: 

“It is my father.  He is always thinking of when I was a girl.  He wants me.”