This was another olive branch, and Edna accepted it as such, and took the blanket more to please her aunt than because she needed it. Her room was the same as ever, with the exception of a few rolls of carpet-rags which were lying in one corner, and at which Edna looked with a kind of nervous dread, as if they had been cut and sewed by her own unwilling hands. It was too dark outside to distinguish more than the faint outline of the tombstones in the graveyard, but Edna singled out her father’s, and putting out her candle knelt down by the low window and gazed long and earnestly at the spot where her father slept. She was bidding his grave farewell, it might be forever, for her resolution was taken to go away from there, and find a place among entire strangers. “It is better so,” she said, as she leaned her hot forehead against the cool window-pane. “’Tis better so, and father would bid me go, if he could speak. Oh, father, if you had not died, all this might have been spared to me.” Then, as she remembered her other Father, her Heavenly one, and His promise to the orphan, she clasped her hands over her face and prayed earnestly for His protection and blessing upon her wherever she might go. And then she thought of Aunt Jerry, and asked that God would bless her, too, and if in what she had said that night there was any thing harsh and wrong, He would forgive her for it, and help her to make amends. Her prayers ended, she crept into her bed, which seemed, with its softness and warmth, to embrace and hold her as a mother might have done, and so embraced and held, she soon fell away to sleep, and forgot all that was past, and ceased to dread what might be in store for her. Meantime Aunt Jerry sat in the room below, with her feet on the stove hearth, her hands locked together around her knees, and her head bent forward until her forehead almost touched her dress. Perhaps she maintained this attitude to accommodate Tabby, who had mounted upon her back and nestled across her neck, and perhaps she did it the better to think intently, for she was thinking of all Edna had said to her with reference to her childhood, and wondering if, after all, her theory was wrong, and children were like chickens, which needed brooding from the mother hen. “But sakes alive, how was I to know that,—I, a dried-up old maid, who never had a baby of my own, and never held one either, except that young one of Mrs. Atwood’s that I stood sponsor for, and almost dropped when I presented it? If things had turned out different, why, I should have been different.”