The northeaster was developing.  It was now raining hard and the wind was rising.  The gusts swept across the top of the little hill and the window sashes of the For’ard Lookout rattled and the hinges of the ancient blinds squeaked.  The yard, which had been so attractive, was shorn of its decorations.  The tables had been carried inside; the lanterns taken down; the wonderful sign, pride of the talented Mr. Bemis, had been tenderly conveyed to the attic.  Cook, waitresses and salesgirl had departed.  The tea-room and gift shop had gone into winter quarters to hibernate until the following spring.

The rooms inside had been thoroughly swept and cleaned and most of the furniture and the best of the old prints covered with dust cloths.  Some of the smaller articles, however, were still upon the shelves of the gift shop, Mary having ordered her assistants to leave them there, as she wished to look them over herself before putting them away.  Some of her selections for stock had sold remarkably well and she had been obliged to reorder many times; others of which she had been quite confident when purchasing had not sold at all.  Both good sellers and bad she meant to list as a guide to future choosing.

She was listing them now.  Alone in the room which had once been the sacred best parlor of the little house, she was seated at the table, pencil in hand and memorandum books and paper before her.  There was no particular reason why the listing should have been done that day; it might have been done any day until the weather became too cold to work in an unheated house.  That morning she had had no idea of doing it that afternoon.  She was doing it now because she felt that she must do something to occupy her mind, and because she wished to be alone.  Up there at the For’ard Lookout she could combine the two—­work and seclusion.

When Mr. Keith told, at the store that morning, the news of Edwin Smith’s—­or Edgar Farmer’s—­death she had been dreadfully shaken by it.  It was so sudden, so unexpected—­when she last heard the man was, so the doctors said, almost well.  She had thought of him often enough during the past year; or, rather, she had thought of Crawford as being with him and of the father’s joy in his son’s return to him and the knowledge that his own disgraceful secret would not be revealed.  And she had pictured Crawford as finding solace for his disappointed love in his father’s society.  That Edgar Farmer had been what Isaiah called him—­a blackguard—­she realized perfectly, but she was equally sure that, as Edwin Smith, he had been the kindest and most loving of fathers.  And Crawford, although he had been willing to leave him because of her, loved him dearly.

And now he was dead, and Crawford was left alone.  Somehow she felt responsible for the death.  That it had been hastened by the terrible alarm and stress of the previous year was, of course, certain.  She thought of Crawford alone and with this new sorrow, and this thought, and that of her responsibility, was almost more than she could bear.