Farewell

There she stood, very pale and quiet, with her large
grave eyes observing everything,--up to every present
circumstance, however small. They could not understand how her
heart was aching all the time, with a heavy pressure that no
sighs could lift off or relieve, and how constant exertion for
her perceptive faculties was the only way to keep herself from
crying out with pain. Moreover, if she gave way, who was to act?
Her father was examining papers, books, registers, what not, in
the vestry with the clerk; and when he came in, there were his
own books to pack up, which no one but himself could do to his
satisfaction.

Besides, was Margaret one to give way before
strange men, or even household friends like the cook and
Charlotte! Not she. But at last the four packers went into the
kitchen to their tea; and Margaret moved stiffly and slowly away
from the place in the hall where she had been standing so long,
out through the bare echoing drawing-room, into the twilight of
an early November evening. There was a filmy veil of soft dull
mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac
hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was
singing,--perhaps, Margaret thought, the very robin that her
father had so often talked of as his winter pet, and for which he
had made, with his own hands, a kind of robin-house by his
study-window. The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first
touch of frost would lay them all low on the ground. Already one
or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low
slanting sun-rays.