“I will have to give this to Hester for her chickens,” said Nancy, surveying the wreck of her cake ruefully, just before she went to bed.
The girls had promised their aunt that they would not talk a great deal before they went to sleep, but they found it difficult to keep their word. Besides discussing the bear adventure they had also to talk over Dr. Minturn’s advice to Beatrice given that morning and heard by Nancy now for the first time.
“He said,” quoted Beatrice, “‘that we must not hurry a man who has been hurt to his very soul.’”
“I think the doctor was right,” the younger girl observed thoughtfully. “John Herrick—I can’t seem to call him anything else—must be just like Aunt Anna, with just such a will as hers. And the more he loved his family the more it must have hurt him to believe that they doubted his honor.”
“But suppose he never comes back to us,” said Beatrice. “Must we sit by and do nothing? He knew who we were from the first day we came here, but he has never made a sign.”
Although they had put out the light, the glowing hands of Beatrice’s wrist-watch reminded her of her promise. Nancy accordingly scurried into her own room to bed, and presumably dropped asleep as quickly as did Beatrice, who could hardly even remember laying her head upon the pillow.
It must have been several hours later that Beatrice awoke. She had slept so soundly that all her weariness was gone and the faintest of sounds outside had broken through the thin fabric of her dreams. She sat up, and turned to the window close beside her bed, to peer out and to listen.
It was moonlight again—a very clear night and so quiet that the big pine-trees stood as immovable as though they were a painted forest on the drop curtain of a theater. The white flood of light set into sharp relief the square frame of the window. Beatrice, looking at the ruffled white curtains, the twin pots of berries on the sill, and the row of books below, thought how quaintly cozy and homelike it looked in contrast to that ghostly wilderness outside. Then, as she leaned against the frame to look out, she drew a deep breath of astonishment.
Very evidently Aunt Anna had been unable to sleep and was sitting, wrapped in her big cloak, reading at the window just below, as was often her custom. A square of light on the ground below, and a shadow that moved a little now and then, as though for the turning of a page, made it plain that this was so. And opposite the window, in a clearing among the pines, some one was walking to and fro. It was John Herrick, with the moonlight on his fair hair and flooding the ground about him like a pool of still water. Somewhere in the dark behind him his horse was tied, for Beatrice, when she listened, could hear now and then the faint stamping of an impatient foot or the jingle of the bit.