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Updated: June 27, 2025
Then they looked at each other, not quite as they had looked before, for in their eyes there was the memory of a kiss. But already something bitter had begun to mingle itself with the fountain of sweets: already Arthur was uncomfortable. He took his arm from Hetty's waist, and said, "Here we are, almost at the end of the Grove. I wonder how late it is," he added, pulling out his watch.
"It is that I see so many faces each year," he replied apologetically, "that it is not possible to remember;" and he gazed earnestly into Hetty's expressive face. "It is twenty years since I was here," Hetty continued. She felt a great longing that Father Antoine should recollect her. It would seem to make her task easier. A reminiscence dawned on the priest's mind.
He was still ruminating over the callousness of the world in respect to lovers when she mounted the stairs and tapped firmly on Hetty's door. His hopes began to revive. A new thought had entered in and lodged securely among them, bracing them up amazingly. "By Jove," he said to himself, staring hard at the floor, "I dare say I did go about it badly. Sara was clever enough to see it.
There was no violent transition, no great change of atmosphere, in the beginnings of their wedded life. Dr. Eben had now lived so much at "Gunn's," that it seemed no strange thing for him to live there altogether. If it chafed him sometimes that it was Hetty's house and not his, Hetty's estate, Hetty's right and rule, he never betrayed it.
"She wouldn't go without you." The doctor hesitated again. He looked into Hetty's eyes: they were fixed on his as steadily, as unembarrassedly, as if he and Hetty had been comrades for years. "What a woman she is," he thought to himself, "to coolly ask me to become their travelling physician, when for six weeks I have been coming to the house every day, and she would not even speak to me!"
A ruddy glow suffused Miss Hetty's cheeks. Robert Grey felt the presence of some great unknown joy. The primary youngsters lisping their faltering words, the men lighting the candles that sent forth the glorious message sparkling from the trees, all seemed moved.
You do believe in the Fat Woman's golden rule, don't you?" and then he added meditatively, "I wonder whether you believe in that other rule, 'Love your enemies, you know?" The color rose to Miss Hetty's cheeks at her nephew's last words and deepened as Mr. Grey said quietly: "Perhaps I believe in them too much for my own good."
But the woman who could be so exceedingly prudent in the management of "nobody's child" was blind to a great deal that required skilful treatment in the characters and dispositions of her own daughters. Miss Davis was more affected than anyone in the house by the news of Hetty's extraordinary good fortune.
The face was marble now; the sweet lips were pallid and half-open and quivering; the dimples were all gone all but one, that never went; and the eyes O, the worst of all was the likeness they had to Hetty's. They were Hetty's eyes looking at him with that mournful gaze, as if she had come back to him from the dead to tell him of her misery.
And yet there was not a day, hardly an hour, in which her mind was not occupied with the details of a plan for going away secretly from her house, under such circumstances as to make it appear that she had been drowned in the lake. That she must leave her husband free to marry Rachel Barlow had become a fixed idea in Hetty's mind.
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