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I suppose Melora couldn't give notice: there would be nothing but the poor-farm for her if she did. But she whined and grumbled and behaved in general like an electrical disturbance. Luckily, she couldn't curdle the milk. Withrow waked into a world of beauty. He walked for an hour before breakfast, through woods all blurred with buds, down vistas brushed with faint color.
He was always faunishly wild in the spring; and for years he hadn't had a chance to seek the season in her haunts. But he turned in before midnight, because he dreaded the next day supremely. He didn't want to meet that face to face until he had to. Melora Meigs lowered like a thunderstorm, but she was held in check by the nurse.
She's an old thing herself, and of course she hasn't the nerves of a sloth. Now she 'does' for Kathleen. Of course later there'll have to be a nurse again. Kathleen mustn't die with only Melora Meigs. I'm not sure, either, that Melora will last. She all crooked over with rheumatism." That was the gist of what I got out of Mildred Thurston.
When the large hand of his watch had quite accomplished its journey, he turned and walked out through the yard to the side door of the house. Melora Meigs was clattering dish-pans somewhere beyond, and the noise she made covered his entrance to the living-room. He drew a deep breath: they were not there.
Reports were that she was gaining all the time, and that she lived out-of-doors staring at Habakkuk and his brethren, gathering wild flowers and pressing them between her palms. She seemed determined to face another winter there alone with Melora, Miss Willis wrote. Withrow set his jaw when that news came.
A few thin generations of people have stared at these hills and much the hills have done for them! Melora Meigs is the child of these mountains; and Melora's sense of beauty is amply expressed in the Orthodox church in Hebron. This landscape, I assure you" she smiled "hasn't made good. So much for the view. It's no use to me, absolutely no use.
She lived, half-ill, in an ugly, not too comfortable cottage, as far as the moon from any world she understood, in a solitude acidulated by Melora Meigs. No pictures, no music, no plays, no talk and this, the whole year round. Would you like it yourselves, you would-be savages with Adirondack guides? Well: that was one of life's little stupidities.
Letters to Miss Somers elicited no real response only a line to say that she wasn't strong enough to write. None of her other female friends could get any encouragement to visit her. It was perhaps due to Miss Thurston's mimicry of Melora Meigs she made quite a "stunt" of it that none of them pushed the matter beyond the first rebuff. By summer-time I began to get worried myself.
Nor had she any right to address me with insolence, unless she were mad, and she was not that. Her eyes snapped very sanely. I don't think Kathleen Somers could have made her voice snap. Melora Meigs grunted and left the room. The grunt was neither assent nor dissent; it was only the most inclusive disapproval: the snarl of an animal, proceeding from the topmost of many layers of dislike.
"This friend of my father's and mine has come to see me. Can he sleep in the barn?" I cannot describe the hostility with which Melora Meigs regarded me. It was not a pointed and passionate hatred. That, one could have examined and dealt with. It was, rather, a vast disgust that happened to include me. "There's nothing to sleep on. Barn's empty."
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