“I wonder if she would have staid if I’d been more outspoken, and told her how much I really wanted her?” Aunt Jerry said, as she returned to the house and began to put it to rights. “But that’s the way with me. I can’t say what I feel. I guess I’m ugly, if I do belong to the Church. I let him go when a word would have kept him, only I was too proud to speak it; and now I’ve lost her, just as I was beginning to know that I did like her some. I wish she knew how near crying I was when she said so queer-like, ‘You never kissed me, auntie, in my life, and we living together these dozen years.’ Don’t she know I ain’t the kissing sort? Still, I might have kissed her when a little child, and not hurt myself.” She was dusting the clock and the mantel, and when she came to the little picture in the rustic frame, she stopped, and continued her soliloquy: “I wonder if she noticed that. If she did, she must know I think something of her, if I never did kiss her, and make a fuss. The likeness ain’t much like her, any way, but still it’s her picture, and I’ve half a mind,—yes, I b’lieve I will;” and reaching up her hand, the strange woman, who in twelve years had never shown her orphan niece a single mark of genuine affection, took down that photograph and kissed it. That was a great deal for her to do, and being done, she began to feel as if she had made atonement for all that had, been wrong in herself heretofore, and that Edna really ought now to come back. But Edna had gone, and as the days went by and brought no news of her, Aunt Jerry began to grow indignant, and finally relieved herself by writing to Mrs. Churchill the letter we have seen. Roy’s reply and the check threw her into a violent rage, and after letting him know her mind, she washed her hands, as she said, of the whole of them, and settled back into her lonely life, sharper, harsher than before, and more disposed to find fault with her clergyman and battle with his decided tendency to High Church and Ritualism. CHAPTER XVII. WHERE EDNA WENT. To Canandaigua first, but not to the seminary, nor yet the jeweller’s, as she had once thought of doing. She had heard from her aunt that Mr. Greenough was paid, and she shrank from meeting him face to face, or from seeing any of her old friends. So she sat quietly in the ladies’ room, waiting for the first train going east, and thinking it would never come. She had bought her ticket for Albany, but, with her thick black veil drawn closely over her face, the ticket agent never suspected that she was the gay, light-hearted girl he used sometimes to see at the station, and who recently had become so noted for the tragic ending of her marriage. No one recognized her, for it was not the hour when the seminary girls were ever at the depot, and when, at last, the train came and took her away with it, nobody was the wiser for her having been there.