"No, father, no one can see: no one shall come in," Hannah answered.
Then for weeks she kept her lonely watch over the half-crazed old man, who started at every sound and whispered piteously: "Don't let them come here, Hannah. I am too old; and there is Grey--the boy--for his sake, Hannah, we will not let them come for me now!"
"No, father, they shall not come. Grey need not know," Hannah always replied, though she had secretly cherished a hope that some time in the future, when the poor old father was dead, she would tell Grey and ask his help to do what she fully meant to do when her hands, bound for thirty years, should be loosened from the chain.
She could trust Grey, could tell him everything, and feel sure that his earnest, truthful blue eyes would took just as lovingly at her as ever, and that he would comfort and help her as no one else could do.
Such was the state of affairs at the farm-house on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, when Hannah was making her preparations to go to Grey's Park for two hours or more, just to sit through the dinner and see Grey, whom she had not seen since his return from Europe.
Her father was not as well that morning. Thanksgiving was always a terrible anniversary for him, for as on that day the several members of a family meet again around the old hearth-stone, so the ghosts of the past all came back to torture him and fill him with remorse.
"How it blows," he said, as the wind shook the windows of his room, and went screaming around the corner of the house. "How it blows, and I seem to hear voices in the storm--your voice, Hannah, as it sounded thirty years ago, when you cried out so loudly, and I struck you for it, and beat old Rover, too. Do you remember it?"
"Yes, yes, father, but don't talk of it to-day; try to forget; try to think only that Grey is here, and that you will see him to-morrow."
"Grey, the boy with the big blue eyes which look so straight at you that I used sometimes to wonder if he did not see into my heart and know what I was hiding?" the old man replied. "Grey, the little boy who would sit on that bench in the woodshed, and kick the floor until I sweat at every pore with fear, and whom I would not touch till he captured my hands, and held them in his soft, warm ones, and kissed them, too, my wicked old hands, kissed by Grey's baby lips. Would he touch them now if he knew? I used to think if I lived till he was a man I would tell him; and maybe you will do it after I am dead. He is coming here to-morrow, you say, and Burton; but Burton isn't like Grey. He is proud and worldly, and a little hard, I am afraid; but the boy, tell him how I love him; try to make him understand, and when he comes to-morrow maybe he will kiss me again. It will be for the last time. I shall never see him more. But hark, what's that? Don't you hear bells? And there is the stamping of feet at the door. Go, child, quickly, and not let them in here."