The accommodation train from New York to Boston was late that day. There was a detention at Hartford and another at Springfield, so that the clock on Miss Betsey McPherson's mantel struck seven when she heard the whistle of the locomotive as the cars stopped at the Allington station. As Miss Betsey was when we last saw her so she was now--tall, and angular, and severe, and looking, as she sat in her hard, straight-back chair, like the very embodiment of the naked truth, from the fit of her dress to the scanty handful of hair, twisted in a knot at the back of her head.
She had heard of Daisy's death from her brother only a few days before, and had felt a pang of regret that she had treated her quite so harshly on the occasion of her visit to her.
"I might, at least, have been civil to her, though it did make me so mad to see her smirking up into my face, with all those diamonds on her, and to know that she was even trying to fool young Allen Browne."
And then her thoughts went after Bessie, for whom her brother had asked help, saying she was left entirely alone in the world, and was, for aught he knew, a very nice girl.
"It is impossible for me to care for her," he wrote, "and as my wife paid all the expenses of her sickness in Rome and for bringing the body home, she will do no more. So it rests with you to care for Bessie, I should think you would like some young person with you in your old age."
"In my old age!" Miss Betsey repeated to herself, as she sat thinking of John's letter, "Yes, I suppose it has come to that, for I am in my sixties, and the boys call me the old woman when I order them out of the cherry tree, and still I feel almost as young as I did forty years ago when Charlie died. Oh, Charlie, my life would have been so different had you lived;" and in the eyes usually so stern and uncompromising there were great tears, as the lonely woman's thoughts went back to the long ago, and the awful tragedy which had darkened all her life.
And then it was that, in the midst of her softened mood, a little girlish figure, dressed in black, came up the steps and knocked timidly at the open door. Bessie had left her luggage at the station, and walked to the house which was pointed out to her as Miss McPherson's by a boy who volunteered to show her the way, and who said to her: "She's a queer old cove, and if you don't mind your p's and q's she will take your head off. She's game, she is."