Charlotte also glanced at it.  “Why, Richard must have come while you were over to our house,” she said.

“It don’t make any odds if he did,” returned Sylvia, with a faint blush and a bridle.  Sylvia was much younger than her sister.  Standing there in the dim light she did not look so much older than her niece.  Her figure had the slim angularity and primness which are sometimes seen in elderly women who are not matrons, and she had donned a little white lace cap at thirty, but her face had still a delicate bloom, and the wistful wonder of expression which belongs to youth.

However, she never thought of Charlotte as anything but a child as compared with herself.  Sylvia felt very old, and the more so that she grudged her years painfully.  She stirred up the fire a little, holding back her shiny black silk skirt carefully.  Charlotte stood leaning against the shelf, looking moodily down at the fire.

“I wouldn’t feel bad if I was you, Charlotte,” Sylvia ventured, timidly.

“I guess we’d better go to bed pretty soon,” returned Charlotte.  “It must be late.”

“Had you rather sleep with me, Charlotte, or sleep in the spare chamber?”

“I guess I’ll go in the spare chamber.”

“Well, I’ll get you a night-gown.”

Both of their faces were sober, but perfectly staid.  They bade each other good-night without a quiver; but Charlotte, after she had said her dutiful and unquestioning prayer, and lay folded in Sylvia’s ruffled night-gown in the best bed, shook with great sobs.  “Poor Barney!” she kept muttering.  “Poor Barney! poor Barney!”

The doors were all open, and once she thought she heard a sob from below, then concluded she must be mistaken.  But she was not, for Sylvia Crane was lamenting as sorely as the younger maiden up-stairs.  “Poor Richard!” she repeated, piteously.  “Poor Richard!  There he came, and the stone was up, and he had to go away.”

The faces which were so clear to the hearts of both women, as if they were before their eyes, had a certain similarity.  Indeed, Richard Alger and Barnabas Thayer were distantly related on the mother’s side, and people said they looked enough alike to be brothers.  Sylvia saw the same type of face as Charlotte, only Richard’s face was older, for he was six years older than she.

“If I hadn’t put the stone up,” she moaned, “maybe he would have thought I didn’t hear him knock, an’ he’d come in an’ waited.  Poor Richard, I dunno what he thought!  It’s the first time it’s happened for eighteen years.”

Sylvia, as she lay there, looked backward, and it seemed to her that the eighteen years were all made up of the Sunday nights on which Richard Alger had come to see her, as if they were all that made them immortal and redeemed them from the dead past.  She had endured grief, but love alone made the past years stand out for her.  Sylvia, in looking back over eighteen years, forgot the father, mother, and