Christian life -- Fiction; Ozark Mountains -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
In her grief over the death of her brother, and in her memories of their
home years so long past, dear old Auntie Sue had forgotten the peculiar
meaning her words might have for the former clerk of the Empire
Consolidated Savings Bank who sat beside her, and to whom she turned in
her sorrow as a mother to a dearly beloved son.
“But it is all right, Brian, dear,” she said with brave cheerfulness.
“When one has watched the sunsets for seventy years, one ceases to fear
the coming of the night, for always there is the morning. Just let me
rest here alone for a little while, and I will be myself again.”
She looked up at him with a smile, and Brian Kent, kneeling beside the
bed, bowed his head and caught the dear old hands to his lips. Without
trusting himself to speak again, the man left the room,--closing the
door.
He moved about the apartment as one in a dream. With a vividness that
was torture, he lived again that hour in the bank when, opening the
afternoon mail, he had found the letter from Susan Wakefield with the
Argentine notes, which her letter said she had received from her brother
John in Buenos Aires, and which she was sending to the bank for deposit
to her little account. It had been a very unbusinesslike letter and a
very unbusinesslike way to transmit money. It was, indeed, this nature
of the transaction that had tempted the hard-pressed clerk.
Mechanically, Brian stopped at his writing-table to finger the
manuscript which he had finished the evening before. Was it only the
evening before? Taking up the volume of closely written sheets which
were bound together by a shoestring that Auntie Sue had laughingly found
for him, when he had so joyously announced the completion of the last
page of his book, he turned the leaves idly,--reading here and there
a sentence with curious interest. The terrific mental strain of his
situation completely divorced him, as it were, from the life which he
had lived during those happy months just past, and which was so fully
represented by his work.
Again the river, swinging around a sudden turn in its course, had come
upon a passage where its peaceful flow was broken by the wild turmoil of
the troubled waters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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