and talk to her while she ate breakfast in the little dining-room; and the old woman poured out upon her the gossip of the Lane, the latest trespasses of the Greek professor’s cow, the escapades of the Phi Gamma Delta’s new dog, the health of Dr. Wandless, the new baby at the house of the Latin professor, the ill-luck of the Madison Eleven, and like matters that were, and that continue to be, of concern in Buckeye Lane.  Rumors of the sale of the cottage had reached Mary, but Sylvia took pains to reassure her.

“Oh, you don’t go with the house, Mary!  Mrs. Owen has a plan for you.  You haven’t any cause for worry.  But it’s too bad to sell the house.  I’d like to get a position teaching in Montgomery and come back here and live with you.  There’s no place in the world quite like this.”

“But it’s quiet, Miss, and the repairs keep going on.  Mr. Harwood had to put a new downspout on the kitchen; the old one had rusted to pieces.  The last time he was over—­that was a month ago—­he came in and sat down to wait for his train, he said; and I told him to help himself to the books, but when I looked in after a while he was just sitting in that chair out there by the window looking out at nothing.  And when I asked him if he’d have a cup of tea, he never answered; not till I went up close and spoke again.  He’s peculiar, but a good-hearted gentleman.  You can see that.  And when he paid me my wages that day he made it five dollars extra, and when I asked him what it was for, he smiled a funny kind of smile he has, and said, ’It’s for being good to Sylvia when she was a little girl.’  He’s peculiar, very peculiar, but he’s kind.  And when I said I didn’t have to be paid for that, he said all right, he guessed that was so, but for me to keep the money and buy a new bonnet or give it to the priest.  A very kind gentleman, that Mr. Harwood, but peculiar.”

The sun came out shortly before noon.  Sylvia walked into town, bought some flowers, and drove to the cemetery.  She told the driver not to wait, and lingered long in the Kelton lot where snow-draped evergreens marked its four corners.  The snow lay smooth on the two graves, and she placed her flowers upon them softly without disturbing the white covering.  A farmboy whistling along the highway saw her in the lonely cemetery and trudged on silently, but he did not know that the woman tending her graves did not weep, or that when she turned slowly away, looking back at last from the iron gates, it was not of the past she thought, nor of the heartache buried there, but of a world newly purified, with long, broad vistas of hope and aspiration lengthening before her.  But we must not too long leave the bell—­an absurd contrivance of wire and knob—­that tinkled rather absently and eerily in the kitchen pantry.  Let us repeat once more and for the last time:—­

Sylvia was reading in her grandfather’s library when the bell tinkled.

Truly enough, a book lay in her lap, but it may be that, after all, she had not done more than skim its pages—­an old “Life of Nelson” that had been a favorite of her grandfather’s.  Sylvia rose, put down the book, marked it carefully as on that first occasion which so insistently comes back to us as we look in upon her.  Mary appeared at the library door, but withdrew, seeing that Sylvia was answering the bell.