Jethro Bass did not answer.  He got up and stood in the window, looking out.

“When she married me,” Wetherell continued steadily, “she told me that there was one whom she had never been able to drive from her heart.  And one summer evening, how well I recall it!—­we were walking under the trees on the Mall and we met my old employer, Mr. Judson, the jeweller.  He put me in mind of the young countryman who had come in to buy a locket, and I asked her if she knew you.  Strange that I should have remembered your name, wasn’t it?  It was then that she led me to a bench and confessed that you were the man whom she could not forget.  I used to hate you then—­as much as was in me to hate.  I hated and feared you when I first came to Coniston.  But now I can tell you—­I can even be happy in telling you.”

Jethro Bass groaned.  He put his hand to his throat as though he were stifling.  Many, many years ago he had worn the locket there.  And now?  Now an impulse seized him, and he yielded to it.  He thrust his hand in his coat and drew out a cowhide wallet, and from the wallet the oval locket itself.  There it was, tarnished with age, but with that memorable inscription still legible,—­“Cynthy, from Jethro”; not Cynthia, but Cynthy.  How the years fell away as he read it!  He handed it in silence to the storekeeper, and in silence went to the window again.  Jethro Bass was a man who could find no outlet for his agony in speech or tears.

“Yes,” said Wetherell, “I thought you would have kept it.  Dear, dear, how well I remember it!  And I remember how I patronized you when you came into the shop.  I believed I should live to be something in the world, then.  Yes, she loved you, Jethro.  I can die more easily now that I have told you—­it has been on my mind all these years.”

The locket fell open in William Wetherell’s hand, for the clasp had become worn with time, and there was a picture of little Cynthia within:  of little Cynthia,—­not so little now,—­a photograph taken in Brampton the year before.  Wetherell laid it beside the daguerreotype.

“She looks like her,” he said aloud; “but the child is more vigorous, more human—­less like a spirit.  I have always thought of Cynthia Ware as a spirit.”

Jethro turned at the words, and came and stood looking over Wetherell’s shoulder at the pictures of mother and daughter.  In the rosewood box was a brooch and a gold ring—­Cynthia Ware’s wedding ring—­and two small slips of yellow paper.  William Wetherell opened one of these, disclosing a little braid of brown hair.  He folded the paper again and laid it in the locket, and handed that to Jethro.

“It is all I have to give you,” he said, “but I know that you will cherish it, and cherish her, when I am gone.  She—­she has been a daughter to both of us.”

“Yes,” said Jethro, “I will.”

William Wetherell lived but a few days longer.  They laid him to rest at last in the little ground which Captain Timothy Prescott had hewn out of the forest with his axe, where Captain Timothy himself lies under his slate headstone with the quaint lettering of bygone days.—­That same autumn Jethro Bass made a pilgrimage to Boston, and now Cynthia Ware sleeps there, too, beside her husband, amid the scenes she loved so well.