I went slowly into the house. Mother had lighted a lamp, and stood at the parlor door. She did not come into the hall to meet me.
She took the letter and went to the light, holding it with the seal unbroken. She might have stood so two minutes.
"Why don't you read, mamma?" spoke up Winthrop. I hushed him.
She opened it then, read it, laid it down upon the table, and went out of the room without a word. I had not seen her face. We heard her go upstairs and shut the door.
She had left the letter open there before us. After a little awed silence, Clara broke out into sobs. I went up and read the few and simple lines.
_Aunt Alice had left for Creston on the appointed day_.
Mother spent that night in the closed room where the lilies had drooped and died. Clara and I heard her pacing the floor till we cried ourselves to sleep. When we woke in the morning, she was pacing it still.
Weeks wore into months, and the months became many years. More than that we never knew. Some inquiry revealed the fact, after a while, that a slight accident had occurred, upon the Erie Railroad, to the train which she should have taken. There was some disabling, but no deaths, the conductor had supposed. The car had fallen into the water. She might not have been missed when the half-drowned passengers were all drawn out.
So mother added a little crape to her widow's weeds, the key of the closed room lay henceforth in her drawer, and all things went on as before. To her children my mother was never gloomy,--it was not her way. No shadow of household affliction was placed like a skeleton confronting our uncomprehending joy. Of what those weeks and months and years were to her--a widow, and quite uncomforted in their dark places by any human love--she gave no sign. We thought her a shade paler, perhaps. We found her often alone with her little Bible. Sometimes, on the Sabbath, we missed her, and knew that she had gone into that closed room. But she was just as tender with us in our little faults and sorrows, as merry with us in our plays, as eager in our gayest plans, as she had always been. As she had always been,--our mother.
And so the years slipped from her and from us. Winthrop went into business in Boston; he never took to his books, and mother was too wise to _push_ him through college; but I think she was disappointed. He was her only boy, and she would have chosen for him the profession of his father and grandfather. Clara and I graduated in our white dresses and blue ribbons, like other girls, and came home to mother, crochet-work, and Tennyson. Just about here is the proper place to begin my story.