Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/139

Rh of Machias, Maine, but Aunt Augusta, all other devices failing, was ready to endure any personal annoyance or hardship rather than to be ignored by one to whom once her slightest wish had been law. Anything to break Reba's defiance. Anything to make the girl submit to the old authority again.

Alone, later, in the little oblong room, Reba sat and gazed out at the glowing sky with a hard tense expression on her gentle mouth. She had got to leave the glow. She had got to go home. There was no escape. She had got to go home, and grow old and dried and bloodless in the gray mausoleum. And all because of the spite of an old embittered woman. It was ungenerous of Aunt Augusta; it was cruel of her; it was unchristian. It was a hundred times more unchristian than Lollie's "darn it" or Mamie's "damn"!

Of course she must go. No other way was open. Certain precepts of right and wrong were graven deep in her heart. Her duty lay clear and straight before her. In New England—or in that corner of it where Ridgefield was located—a daughter's obligation to a helpless parent was absolute. Reba had watched many a young woman grow middle-aged and gray, and some young men, in such service. Betrothals were prolonged for years and years, as a matter of course, or broken, abandoned entirely, rather than to fail in performing the first duty to a dependent father or mother. The hills around Ridgefield, Reba well knew, were dotted with remote, lonely little farm-houses, where hopes and young dreams were slowly fading year by year, as the spark of life in the old white-haired lady, or trembling man, who always sat in the high-backed rocker by the front window, miraculously lingered on, like the