wanted to eat with Hildegarde. She wanted something of everything they would cook. "We'll have cream toast enough for all of us, and poach enough eggs."
Because of the lack of warmth, they decided not to eat in the dining-room. But they put a white cloth in place of the red one on the kitchen table, and they set on it glass dishes of pickled peaches, and other pickles and red plum jelly, and strawberry preserves, and when Hildegarde came down, and beheld the steaming dishes, she said, "Is this the fatted calf?"
And Aunt Olivia said, "This is your welcome home."
But there was another welcome. Hildegarde had found it in that upper room where she had slept with her mother. This time the room had not seemed small, it had not seemed squalid. It had seemed like a calm and beautiful island in a sea of strife. With the rain beating around it, it was safe and still. All the clamour she had left at Round Hill seemed far away. Blessedly far. She could not even catch the echo.
And so as she sat at her aunts' table, and they bent their heads in their usual silent grace, she lifted her own, "Oh, dear Lord," she said, "I am so—thankful. . . ." That was all. But it seemed to the old aunts, listening, that their sister, Elizabeth, spoke.
While Hildegarde ate, she talked to them. She told them everything. They had a right to know. Summing it all up, it came to this—that Louis had asked things of her which were impossible. There had been no other way but to leave him.
"If I had stayed, I should have given up my self-respect—my freedom."
