IV

The next months were the hardest of her life.  The long dreary battle against insurmountable obstacles she had been able to bear with a stoical front, but the sickening alternations of emotions which now filled her days wore upon her until she was fairly suffocated.  About mail time each day she became of an unendurable irritability, so that poor Miss Molly was quite afraid to go near her.  For the first time in her life there was no living thing growing in her house.

“Don’t you mean to have any service this Christmas?” asked Miss Molly one day.

Miss Abigail shouted at her so fiercely that she retreated in a panic.  “Why not?  Why shouldn’t we?  What makes you think such a thing?”

“Why, I didn’t know of anybody to go but just you and me, and I noticed that you hadn’t any flowers started for decorations the way you always do.”

Miss Abigail flamed and fulminated as though her timid little friend had offered her an insult.  “I’ve been to service in that church every Christmas since I was born and I shall till I die.  And as for my not growing any flowers, that’s my business, ain’t it!” Her voice cracked under the outraged emphasis she put on it.

Her companion fled away without a word, and Miss Abigail sank into a chair trembling.  It came over her with a shock that her preoccupation had been so great that she had forgotten about her winter flowers.

The fortnight before Christmas was interminable to her.  Every morning she broke a hobbling path through the snow to the post-office, where she waited with a haggard face for the postmaster’s verdict of “nothing.”  The rest of the day she wandered desolately about her house, from one window to another, always staring, staring up at Hemlock Mountain.

She disposed of the problem of the Christmas service with the absent competence of a person engrossed in greater matters.  Miss Molly had declared it impossible—­there was no money for a minister, there was no congregation, there was no fuel for the furnace.  Miss Abigail wrote so urgently to the Theological Seminary of the next State that they promised one of their seniors for the service; and she loaded a hand sled with wood from her own woodshed and, harnessing herself and Miss Molly to it, drew it with painful difficulty through the empty village street.  There was not enough of this fuel to fill even once the great furnace in the cellar, so she decreed that the service should be in the vestibule where a stove stood.  The last few days before Christmas she spent in sending out desperate appeals to remote families to come.  But when the morning arrived, she and Miss Molly were the only ones there.