“I know there will be a difference in your inward life,” she said wistfully.

And oh, there was!  But sometimes I wondered uneasily, feeling almost conscience-stricken, whether it were wholly because Hester had left me—­whether it were no partly because, for a second time, I had shut the door of my heart in the face of love at her bidding.

When I had dressed I went downstairs to the front door, and sat on the sandstone steps under the arch of the Virginia creeper.  I was all alone, for Mary Sloane had gone to Avonlea.

It was a beautiful night; the full moon was just rising over the wooded hills, and her light fell through the poplars into the garden before me.  Through an open corner on the western side I saw the sky all silvery blue in the afterlight.  The garden was very beautiful just then, for it was the time of the roses, and ours were all out—­so many of them—­great pink, and red, and white, and yellow roses.

Hester had loved roses and could never have enough of them.  Her favorite bush was growing by the steps, all gloried over with blossoms—­white, with pale pink hearts.  I gathered a cluster and pinned it loosely on my breast.  But my eyes filled as I did so—­I felt so very, very desolate.

I was all alone, and it was bitter.  The roses, much as I loved them, could not give me sufficient companionship.  I wanted the clasp of a human hand, and the love-light in human eyes.  And then I fell to thinking of Hugh, though I tried not to.

I had always lived alone with Hester.  I did not remember our parents, who had died in my babyhood.  Hester was fifteen years older than I, and she had always seemed more like a mother than a sister.  She had been very good to me and had never denied me anything I wanted, save the one thing that mattered.

I was twenty-five before I ever had a lover.  This was not, I think, because I was more unattractive than other women.  The Merediths had always been the “big” family of Newbridge.  The rest of the people looked up to us, because we were the granddaughters of old Squire Meredith.  The Newbridge young men would have thought it no use to try to woo a Meredith.

I had not a great deal of family pride, as perhaps I should be ashamed to confess.  I found our exalted position very lonely, and cared more for the simple joys of friendship and companionship which other girls had.  But Hester possessed it in a double measure; she never allowed me to associate on a level of equality with the young people of Newbridge.  We must be very nice and kind and affable to them—­noblesse oblige, as it were—­but we must never forget that we were Merediths.

When I was twenty-five, Hugh Blair came to Newbridge, having bought a farm near the village.  He was a stranger, from Lower Carmody, and so was not imbued with any preconceptions of Meredith superiority.  In his eyes I was just a girl like others—­a girl to be wooed and won by any man of clean life and honest heart.  I met him at a little Sunday-School picnic over at Avonlea, which I attended because of my class.  I thought him very handsome and manly.  He talked to me a great deal, and at last he drove me home.  The next Sunday evening he walked up from church with me.