“Indeed I’ll take it.”  She laid it on her palm and looked at it with rapture.  She fastened the fob in a buttonhole of her blouse, but removed it with a shake of the head.  “I’ll just keep it to look at, and only wear it with my black silk.  It’s out of place on this rusty alpaca.”

“What a close-fisted old girl the Circus must—­”

“Oh, hush, hush!  She might hear you.”  Abby rose hastily.  “Let us walk in the garden.”

They sauntered between the now well-kept lawns and flower-beds and entered a long avenue of fig-trees.  The purple fruit hung abundantly among the large green leaves.  Miss Williams opened one of the figs and showed Strowbridge the red luscious pith.

“You don’t have these over there.”

“We don’t.  Are they good to eat this way?”

She held one of the oval halves to his mouth.

“Eat!” she said.

And he did.  Then he ate a dozen more that she broke for him.

“I feel like a greedy school-boy,” he said.  “But they are good, and no mistake.  You have introduced me to another pleasure.  Now let us go and take a pull.”

All that afternoon there was no mirror to tell her that she was not the girl who had come to Webster Hall a quarter of a century before.  That night she knelt long by her bed, pressing her hands about her face.

“I am a fool, I know,” she thought, “but such things have been.  If only I had a little of her money.”

The next day she went down to the lake, not admitting that she expected him to take her out; it would be enough to see him.  She saw him.  He rowed past with Elinor Holt, the most beautiful girl of the lakeside.  His gaze was fixed on the flushed face, the limpid eyes.  He did not look up.

Miss Williams walked back to the house with the odd feeling that she had been smitten with paralysis and some unseen force was propelling her.  But she was immediately absorbed in the manifold duties of the housekeeping.  When leisure came reaction had preceded it.

“I am a fool,” she thought.  “Of course he must show Elinor Holt attention.  He is her father’s guest.  But he might have looked up.”

That night she could not sleep.  Suddenly she was lifted from her thoughts by strange sounds that came to her from the hall without.  She opened the door cautiously.  A white figure was flitting up and down, wringing its hands, the gray hair bobbing about the jerking head.

“No use!” it moaned.  “No use, no use, no use!  I’m old, old, old!  Seventy-four, seventy-four, seventy-four!  Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! oh, Lord!  Thy ways are past finding out.  Amen!”

Abby closed her door hurriedly.  She felt the tragedy out there was not for mortal eyes to look upon.  In a few moments she heard the steps pause before her door.  Hands beat lightly upon it.

“Give me back those thirty years!” whimpered the old voice.  “They are mine!  You have stolen them from me!”