The Burden

Grandma Markham was dead, and the covered sleigh, which late in the
afternoon plowed its way heavily back to Aikenside, carried only Mrs.
Noah, who, with her forehead tied up in knots, sat back among the
cushions, thinking not of the peaceful dead, gone forever to the rest
which remains for the people of God, but of the wayward Guy, who had
resisted all her efforts to persuade him to return with her, instead
of staying where he was, not needed, and where his presence was a
restraint to all save one, and that one Maddy, for whose sake he
stayed.

"She'd be vummed," the indignant old lady said, "if she would not
write to Lucy herself if Guy did not quit such doin's," and thus
resolving she kept on her way, while the subject of her wrath was, it
may be, more than half repenting of his decision to stay, inasmuch as
he began to have an unpleasant consciousness of himself being in
everybody's way.

In the first hour of Maddy's bereavement he had not spoken with her,
but had kept himself aloof from the room where, with her grandfather
and Uncle Joseph, she sat, holding the poor aching head of the latter
in her lap and trying to speak a word of consolation to the old,
broken-hearted man, whose hand was grasped in hers. But Maddy knew he
was there. She could hear his voice each time he spoke to Mrs. Noah,
and that made the desolation easier to bear. She did not look forward
to the time when he would be gone; and when at last he told her he was
going, she started quickly, and with a gush of tears, exclaimed: "No,
no! oh, no!"