With the hot July weather Aunt Harriet’s health flagged.  She seemed suddenly to have grown much older.  The erect figure stooped a little, her high color had faded and her voice lost some of its energy and determination.  She was not able to fulfill all her former public duties, and she fretted greatly at the enforced inaction.  She was one of those characters who would rather wear out than rust out, and it required the utmost firmness on the part of her doctor to persuade her from over-exerting herself.  Instead of being in a continual whirl of creche committee meetings, workhouse inspections, and creche management, she now spent long quiet afternoons in the shaded drawing-room learning that (to her) hardest of all lessons, how to rest!  Winona, busy with the last exciting weeks of the school term, was too occupied to give much thought to her aunt, but could not help remarking that the latter’s spirits had failed lately.  Miss Beach was far gentler than of yore.  She did not snap her niece up so suddenly, or give vent to excited tirades about subjects which irritated her.  Sometimes she even looked at Winona with a wistfulness that the girl noticed.  It puzzled her, for it was the same half-appealing glance that her mother often cast at her.  She was accustomed to shoulder her mother’s burdens, and loved her all the more for her helplessness and dependence.  But Aunt Harriet, so strong and determined and capable, the oracle of the family, and the very epitome of all the cardinal virtues, surely she could not want any one to lean upon?  The idea was unthinkable.  Yet again and again it returned to her, and the consciousness of it stirred new chords.

One evening Winona came rather softly into the drawing-room.  Her aunt, sitting by the window in the gathering twilight, did not hear her enter.  Miss Beach was reading, and the last little gleam of the sunset fell on her gray hair.  How worn she looked, Winona thought.  It had never struck her so forcibly before.  Was that a tear shining on her cheek?  Miss Beach rose slowly, put down her book, took her handkerchief from her bag and deliberately wiped her eyes; then, still unconscious of her niece’s presence, she went out through the French window into the garden.

Winona walked across the room, hesitated for a moment but did not venture to follow her.  Almost automatically she took up the book which Aunt Harriet had been reading.  It was a little volume of extracts, and one had been marked with a penciled cross:—­

    “Put your arms around me—­
    There, like that: 
    I want a little petting
    At life’s setting,
    For ’tis harder to be brave
    When feeble age comes creeping,
    And finds me weeping,
    Dear ones gone. 
    Just a little petting
    At life’s setting: 
    For I’m old, alone and tired,
    And my long life’s work is done.”