Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/178

168 see if "that girl" in the kitchen had got in yet, or if the back door was surely locked, or the back-hall light out; or to turn back a blanket, or get an extra one, or fill the hot-water bag, or mix a pinch of soda in half a glass of boiling water. It was a difficult summer for Reba. She grew pale under the strain of it.

But the hardships she was called upon to bear were trivial as compared to the demands of Aunt Augusta's self-imposed task. Many a night, lying wide awake in Syringa Rand's bare, carpetless north bedroom in the broken-down wooden bed, which no second-hand furniture dealer had thought worth carting away, Augusta and the long-suffering Emma by her side longed dumbly for the comforts and security of 89 Chestnut Street. Syringa's manner of living proved to be cruder than Augusta remembered. The distance from well to kitchen-sink longer; the care of one horse, a cow, and a dozen or so hens more arduous than she supposed, but with Spartan-like severity, she told herself that a little extra work couldn't hurt her. Secretly, she dreaded keenly the approaching winter months, snowbound in the denuded old farm-house, and was in constant terror of the creature—half beast, half man—who shook hairy fists at her every time he saw her and had to be kept behind closed doors. But so long as the reasons which she had given out to Reba, and to her little world in Ridgefield, for undertaking this self-sacrificing task existed, so long, it seemed to her, she must stay by it. No self-respecting woman could abandon a mission of mercy, as broadly advertised as hers had been, simply because it proved disagreeable.