den on the night she fled the Town in the nest-like parlor of this very house.
Miss Ogilvie, packing her best taffeta with its corals and cameos to wear at the concert, indulged in an orgy of memories . . . memories that went back to the years before Ellen was born, to the days in Munich when for a delirious week, until the heavy hand of her father intervened, she had fancied she would become a great musician and play in public.
Pausing beside the old tin-bound trunk, she thought, "No, I never could have done it. I was too much a coward. But Ellen has . . . Ellen has. . . . And to think that I advised her to do it, that I told her to go ahead."
In the long span of a gentle life in which there had been no heights and no valleys, this occasion eclipsed all else . . . even the day she had herself sailed on the black paquebot for Europe.
"It happens like that . . . in the most unexpected places, in villages, in towns. . . . Why, even in a dirty mill town like this."
It all came back to her now, all the conversation between herself and Ellen on that last day when, weeping, she said to the girl, "I no longer count for anything. You are beyond me. Who am I to instruct you?"
And she remembered too with a sudden warmth the old bond between them, the hatred of this awful, sooty Town . . . a desert from which Ellen had boldly escaped, which Miss Ogilvie had accepted, hiding always in her heart her loathing of the place.
"And to think that she remembered me . . . a poor, insignificant old woman like me! To think that she even paid my way!"
For Miss Ogilvie could not have come otherwise. As the years passed she had grown poorer and poorer in her house behind the trees.
Her conscience pricked the old lady. "I wonder," she thought, sitting on the edge of her chair before the old trunk. "I wonder if I should confess to Hattie Tolliver that it was I who helped them to escape. It would be more honest, since I am going to stay with her."
