CHAPTER II.
Instead of resorting to the woods, her old friend, Esther made her way down to the plum thicket. The honey bees were humming to the heart of the blossoms.
Throwing herself full length upon the ground, she lay in a white drift of them. An hour or more was given to heartrending sobs of utter grief and abandonment of everything in the whole world.
The pathos of her starved, unsympathetic existence, living in isolation among people as heavy as wet clay. All the sentiment, thought, passion, of her being had no outlet—none of the cravings of her youth had been satisfied.
Between her and Glenn Andrews the silence had been unbroken for almost a year.
As she lay there looking up, with her arms folded under her head, her heart almost bursting with a sense of her own helplessness, she pictured herself accepting the knowledge that she would never see him again. All the unhealthy fancies born of loneliness and sorrow possessed her. The day was gray. The steel rim of the sky seemed to fit the woods. She watched it with a stifling sensation. It looked as if it would soon bend the trees double and close in, shutting down upon the narrow space in which she lived.
She remembered to have seen her grandfather turn an old, worn pan of granite down upon his early tomato slips. He did this to keep out the light, until they could get strength enough to stand the hardier growth—he did it to force them. The consistence of nature’s laws she did not understand.
She only knew that to-day for her was very lonely, narrow and dark, and to-morrow would be another to-day when it came.
She went back to the house with a dull expression of hopelessness in her eyes.