She seemed to pause somewhat deeply to vision something within. Miss Darcy watched the moving walls, now standing close, now a little receding, now opening as it were into gateways through which were seen forest lawns and aisles. They shut in again. A golden bough brushed the phaeton. She who had been speaking put out her hand and touched it. "How could one help but love it? To me it is forever so old and forever so new! I lock with it.... What was I saying? Well, Edgar did not like it, and my mother failed, and father had less money and less money--and still we went on ... five years, eight years, ten years. Then in one year my father died and my mother died.... Will came home. He and Edgar said that we must sell Sweet Rocket. I wasn't eighteen. We knew about the mortgage, but we didn't know about some other debts. When it was sold there was hardly anything to divide among us--" "The Lindens didn't buy it back, then?" "No, not then. Northern people bought it. Will went back to Wyoming, and Edgar with him. I went to my mother's sister--Aunt Hester--who lived in Richmond. I went to her with my two hundred and fifty dollars a year. She's one of the best of women. I never had anything but kindness from her--and one of the greatest was when she spoke of me to you!" She put her hand over Miss Darcy's hand. "I had been to school a little, of course. There were some books at home, and I had borrowed where I could. But in Richmond, to you, I really began to go to school." "You studied as very few study, Marget. You studied as though waves of things were coming happily back into memory." "Yes. But you released something. Always fire is lit from fire. Always one comes to any that sit in darkness.... Well, I went to school for three years. Then off you go from that school to Canada, to England, to I don't know where! I stayed in Richmond and went to a business school. I learned typewriting and stenography. I began to earn my living." "You were with Baker and Owen?" "Yes. And then I passed into library work. I went to Washington. I was in the library there for five years. I saved. I wrote a few papers that were published. I took what they brought me and what I had saved, and I left the library and I went around the world, second class and third class--and at times fourth--and I learned and enjoyed. I taught English here and there, and so I paid as I went. I came back in four years--back to Richmond and Aunt Hester, until I might look about me and see what I could do, for I must earn." "If you had written to me then in New York--"