"Of course he could not understand my feelings," Miss Charlotte said, with a bitterness which I am sure was unconscious. "He never had a family, and I ought to remember that."
She grew somewhat more calm as she unburdened her heart. She told me George had praised the place, and said how much he had always liked it. He confessed that it was his wife who first suggested the purchase: she wanted a house where she could entertain and which would be of more importance than the one in which she lived.
"He said," Miss Charlotte went on with a strange mingling of pride and sorrow, "his wife felt that the house in itself would give any family social standing. I don't know how pleased his wife would be if she knew he told me, but he said it. He told me she meant to have repairs and improvements. She must feel as if she owned it already. He said she had an iron dog stored somewhere that she meant to put on the lawn. Think of it, Ruth, an iron dog on our old lawn!"
Then suddenly all the sorrow of her lot seemed to overwhelm her at once, and she broke down completely. She sobbed so unrestrainedly and with so complete an abandonment of herself to her grief that I cried with her, even while I was trying to stop her tears.
"It isn't just George Weston's coming to ask me to sell the place," she said; "it is all of it: it's my being so poor I can't keep up the name, and the family's ending with me, and none of my kin even to bury me. It's all of the hurts I've got from life, Ruth; and it's growing so old I've no strength any longer to bear them. Oh, it's having to keep on living when I want to be dead!"
I threw my arms about her, and kissed the tears from her wrinkled cheeks, though there were about as many on my own.
"Don't," I begged her, "don't, dear Miss Charlotte. You break my heart! We are all of us your kin, and you know we love you dearly."
She returned my embrace convulsively, and tried to check her sobbing.
"I know it's cowardly," she got out brokenly. "It's cowardly and wicked. I never broke down so before. I won't, Ruth dear. Just give me a little time."
Dear Miss Charlotte! I made her stay with me all day; and indeed she was in no condition to do anything else. I got her to take a nap in the afternoon, and when she went home she was once more her own brave self. She said good-night with one of her clumsy joking speeches.