No other place but this room had seen these
old agonies of hers. She would be sorry after all to leave it.
There were not many things beside the books. Two bowls of blue
Glebeshire pottery, cheap things but precious, a box plastered with
coloured shells, an amber bead necklace, a blue leather writing-
case, a photograph of her father as a young clergyman with a beard
and whiskers, a faded daguerreotype of her mother, last, but by no
means least, a small black lacquer musical-box that played two
tunes, "Weel may the Keel row" and "John Peel,"--these were her
worldly possessions.
She sat there; as the day closed down, the trees were swept into the
night, the wind rose in the dark wood, the winter's moon crept pale
and cold into the sky, snow began to fall, at first thinly, then in
a storm, hiding the moon, flinging the fields and roads into a white
shining splendour; the wind died and the stars peeped between the
flakes of whirling snow.
She sat without moving, accusing her heart of hardness, of
unkindness. She seemed to herself then deserving of every
punishment. "If I had only gone to him," she thought again and
again.
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