She yearned over the wanderer and longed to mother him, as, somehow, she knew he needed to be mothered.  She kept near her a copy of his last little book of poems which she had read again and again.  In the earlier ones she saw a loose handful of jewels in the rough, yet she recognized the sparkle which distinguishes the genuine from the false.  In the later ones she perceived gems “of purest ray serene,” polished and strung and ready to be passed on from generation to generation—­priceless heir-looms.

She was a tall woman, and deep-bosomed, with large but clear-cut and strong features, and handsome, deepset gray eyes which habitually wore the expression of one who has loved much and sorrowed much.  She had been called stately before her proud spirit had bowed itself in submission to the chastenings of grief—­since when she had borne the seal of meekness.  But there was a distinction about her that neither grief nor poverty could destroy.  She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman.  In the simple, but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned conception of “a widow indeed.”

Her hands were not her least striking feature.  They were large, but perfectly modelled, and they were deft, capable, full of character and feeling.  In their touch there was a wonderfully soothing quality.  In winter they always possessed just the pleasantest degree of warmth; in summer just the most grateful degree of coolness.  No one ever received a greeting from them without being impressed with the friendliness, the sympathy of their clasp.

As she bent her fine, deeply-lined face over them, and the work they held, while the little Virginia sat nursing a doll at her feet, she often stitched into the garments that they fashioned yearnings, thoughts, questionings of the youth—­her brother’s child—­whose picture, as she had conceived him from descriptions she had heard, she carried in her heart.  She knew too well the weakness that was his inheritance and she knew too, what perils were in waiting to ensnare the feet of untried youth—­poor, homeless and without the restraining influences of friends and kindred—­whatever their inheritance might be.

Sometimes she felt that the yearning was almost more than she could bear, and that she must arise and go forth and seek this straying sheep of the fold of Poe.  But alas, she was but a woman, without money and without a clue upon which to begin to work save such as wild, improbable and contradictory rumors afforded.  That was, after all, what she most needed—­a clue.  If she could only find a clue, poor as she was, she would follow it to the ends of the earth!

Upon a summer’s day two years after Edgar’s disappearance, and when she had almost given up hope, the clue came.  It was placed in her hand by her cousin, and Edgar’s, Neilson Poe, who had no faith in its value but passed it on to her as it had come to him—­“for what it was worth,” as he expressed it.