“Yet we almost had to go back,” Nancy observed.
“Yes, if it had not been for Beatrice’s thinking of the cabin and for her courage in bringing us here, we would have had to give it up. And so far we have heard nothing, but I cannot help hoping that we still may.”
“But why, Aunt Anna, why did you never tell us before?” Beatrice put the question with the same puzzled frown she had worn when the story began.
“I wanted to, but I could not bear to. You were always so hurried and so deep in affairs of your own, as is the natural thing. To tell you and have you think, even for a fleeting minute, that my brother did wrong—that would have been beyond endurance. He is only a name to you, and after all, as Robert Kirby says, nothing has ever been proved. But you _must_ believe in my brother; you _must_.”
She leaned back and a slow tear of weariness and long-endured misery rolled down her cheek. The recital had tired her far more than they had realized, so that Nancy, suddenly taking alarm, whisked her away to bed. There, with many loving pats and hugs and words of affectionate comfort, they at last saw her ready for sleep.
Yet Beatrice, lying broad awake in her little room, watching the curtains flutter in the windy dark, could not put from her mind the thought of what she had heard. Presently she got up to steal into Nancy’s room opposite and see how she was faring. She found that the bed was empty and that her sister was kneeling by the window, staring out into the forest. A solitary coyote was yelping in the woods, but it was a sound to which they had become so accustomed that it was doubtful if they even heard it. The pale light of a late moon showed the moving tree-tops, the dark chasm of the stream, and, hardly to be discerned among the pines, the square chimney stacks and one tiny light that marked the place of John Herrick’s house.
“Don’t stay there in the cold,” remonstrated Beatrice. “You can’t see anything or—or anybody in the middle of the night.”
“I know it,” sighed Nancy as she turned from the window. “I was just thinking.”
She climbed on the bed and sat with her knees humped and her arm flung around them, still staring, as though fascinated, out through the window toward that slope of the mountain where John Herrick lived.