Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/352

 stuck to her post, smiling and making prearranged rustic speeches all the summer. She earned enough to pay the school-teacher another winter and to buy the fuel for the schoolhouse, and again the Martins and the Aliens stayed over; though they announced with a callous indifference to Miss Abigail's ideas that they were going down to Johnsonville at Christmas to visit their relatives there, and have the children go to the tree the ex-Greenfordites always trimmed.

When she heard this Miss Abigail set off to the Allen farm on the lower slope of Hemlock Mountain. "Wa'n't our tree good enough?" she demanded hotly.

"The tree was all right," they answered, "but the children were so mortal lonesome. Little Katie Ann came home crying."

Miss Abigail turned away without answering and hobbled off up the road toward the mountain. Things were black before her eyes and in her heart as she went blindly forward where the road led her. She still fought off any acknowledgment of the bitterness that filled her, but when the road, after dwindling to a wood trail and then to a path, finally stopped, she sat down with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end," she said aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that she meant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in the bare November woods unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewarded by a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not been for forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of Hemlock Mountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head of the gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her