“Coming?” said mother, nervously, and stepped out to the gate, full in the sunlight that crowned her like royal gold.

The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.

“Why, she hasn’t come!” All the eager color died out of her face.  “I am so disappointed!”—­speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly into the house.

Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,—­I was the oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us, instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my years were.  “Sarah, I don’t understand.  You think she might have lost the train?  But Alice is so punctual.  Alice never lost a train.  And she said she would come.”  And then, a while after, “I don’t understand.”

It was not like my mother to worry.  The next day the coach lumbered up and rattled past, and did not stop,—­and the next, and the next.

“We shall have a letter,” mother said, her eyes saddening every afternoon.  But we had no letter.  And another day went by, and another.

“She is sick,” we said; and mother wrote to her, and watched for the lumbering coach, and grew silent day by day.  But to the letter there was no answer.

Ten days passed.  Mother came to me one afternoon to ask for her pen, which I had borrowed.  Something in her face troubled me vaguely.

“What are you going to do, mother?”

“Write to your aunt’s boarding-place.  I can’t bear this any longer.”  She spoke sharply.  She had already grown unlike herself.

She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of mail.

It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked for it.  I came home early from school.  Mother was sewing at the parlor window, her eyes wandering from her work, up the road.  It was an ugly day.  It had rained drearily from eight o’clock till two, and closed in suffocating mist, creeping and dense and chill.  It gave me a childish fancy of long-closed tombs and low-land graveyards, as I walked home in it.

I tried to keep the younger children quiet when we went in, mother was so nervous.  As the early, uncanny twilight fell, we grouped around her timidly.  A dull sense of awe and mystery clung to the night, and clung to her watching face, and clung even then to that closed room upstairs where the lilies were fading.

Mother sat leaning her head upon her hand, the outline of her face dim in the dusk against the falling curtain.  She was sitting so when we heard the first rumble of the distant coach-wheels.  At the sound, she folded her hands in her lap and stirred a little, rose slowly from her chair, and sat down again.

“Sarah.”

I crept up to her.  At the near sight of her face, I was so frightened I could have cried.

“Sarah, you may go out and get the letter.  I—­I can’t.”

I went slowly out at the door and down the walk.  At the gate I looked back.  The outline of her face was there against the window-pane, white in the gathering gloom.