Though the doctor left the church with Shirley and her mother, he did not drive to Rosewood, but to his office. There, alone with Mrs. Dandridge while Shirley waited in the carriage, he unlocked the little tin box that had been the major’s, with the key Mrs. Dandridge gave him, and put into her hands a little packet of yellow oiled-silk which bore her name. He noted that it agitated her profoundly and as she thrust it into the bosom of her dress, her face seemed stirred as he had never seen it. When he put her again in the carriage, he patted her shoulder with a touch far gentler than his gruff good-by.

At Rosewood, at length, alone in her room, she sat down with the packet in her hands. During the long hours since first the little key had lain in her palm like a live coal, she had been all afire with eagerness. Now the moment had come, she was almost afraid.

She tried to imagine that letter’s coming to her—then. Thirty years ago! A May day, a day of golden sunshine and flowers. The arbors had been covered with roses then, too, like those whose perfume drifted to her now. Evil news flies fast, and she had heard of the duel very early that morning. The letter would have reached her later. She would have fled away with it to this very room to read it alone—as she did now!

With unsteady fingers she unwrapped the oiled-silk, broke the letter’s seal, and read:

When she had read thus far, she closed the letter, and pressing a hand against her heart as if to still its throbbing, locked the written pages in a drawer of her bureau. She went down-stairs and made Ranston bring her chair to its accustomed place under the rose-arbor, and sat there through the falling twilight.

She and Shirley talked but little at dinner, and what she said seemed to come winging from old memories—her own girlhood, its routs and picnics and harum-scarum pleasures. And there were long gaps in which she sat silent, playing with her napkin, the light color coming and going in her delicate cheek, lost in revery. It was not till the hall-clock struck her usual hour that she rose to go to her room.

“Don’t send Emmaline,” she said. “I shan’t want her.” She kissed Shirley good night. “Maybe after a while you will sing for me; you haven’t played your harp for ever so long.”

In the subdued candle-light Mrs. Dandridge locked the door of her room. She opened a closet, and from the very bottom of a small haircloth trunk, lifted and shook out from its many tissue wrappings a faded gown of rose-colored silk, with pointed bodice and old-fashioned puff-sleeves. She spread this on the bed and laid with it a pair of yellowed satin slippers and a little straw basket that held a spray of what had once been cape jessamine.

In the flickering light she undressed and rearranged her hair, catching its silvery curling meshes in a low soft coil. Looking almost furtively about her, she put on the rose-colored gown, and pinned the withered flower-spray on its breast. She lighted more candles—in the wall-brackets and on the dressing-table—and the reading-lamp on the desk. Standing before her mirror then, she gazed long at the reflection—the poor faded rose-tint against the pale ivory of her slender neck, and the white hair. A little quiver ran over her lips.

“‘Whatever the fact,’” she whispered, “‘... you and no other, as long as I live.’”

She unlocked the bureau-drawer then, took out the letter, and seating herself by the table, read the remainder:

She had begun to tremble so that the paper shook in her hands, and from her breast, shattered by her quick breathing, the brown jessamine petals dusted down in her lap. It was some moments before she could calm herself sufficiently to read on.

She put the letter down and laid her face upon it. “Beauty! Beauty!” she whispered, dry-eyed. “I never knew! I never knew! But it would have made no difference, darling. I would have forgiven you anything—everything! You know that, now, dear! You have been certain of it all these years that have been so empty, empty to me!”

But when the faded rose-colored gown and the poor time-yellowed slippers had been laid back in the haircloth trunk; when, her door once more unbolted, she lay in her bed in the dim glow of the reading-lamp, with her curling silvery hair drifting across the pillow and the letter beneath it, at last the tears came coursing down her cheeks.

And with the loosening of her tears, gradually and softly came joy—infinitely deeper than the anguish and sense of betrayal. It poured upon her like a trembling flood. Long, long ago he had gone out of the world—it was only his memory that counted to her. Now that could no longer spell pain or emptiness or denial. It was engoldened by a new light, and in that light she would walk gently and smilingly to the end.

She found the slender golden chain that hung about her neck and opened the little black locket with its circlet of laureled pearls. And as she gazed at the face it held, which time had not touched with change, the sound of Shirley’s harp came softly in through the window. She was playing an old-fashioned song, of the sort she knew her mother loved best:

Outside the leaves rustled, the birds called and the crickets sang their unending epithalamia of summer nights, and on this tone-background the melody rose tenderly and lingeringly like a haunting perfume of pressed flowers. She smiled and lifted the locket to her face, whispering the words of the refrain:

The smile was still on her lips when she fell asleep, and the little locket still lay in her fingers.