Aunt Olivia, pouring a third reckless cup of coffee, said: "It won't be easy after you have lived in luxury."
"There's the luxury of a mind at ease," Hildegarde said staunchly.
They gazed at her with admiration. She seemed so strong and sure. Yet she was slender as a willow, a slip of a thing, almost a child.
It was significant that, throughout the whole conversation there had been no mention of Crispin. They had not seemed to avoid it.
But they had avoided it. And now out of a silence in which they heard the beating of the rain, the howling of the wind, Aunt Catherine said, "Does Crispin know that you've left your father?"
"No. I am going to write to him tonight."
It was a simple statement, but something in her voice seemed to open to the two old women the gate of romance, as Crispin had opened it when he had talked to them. And as they listened they did not feel barred out of her paradise as those two dark men had felt on the morning she had left Round Hill. They had rather a sense of being included in this miracle which was happening before their eyes.
After Hildegarde went upstairs, they talked of it in low tones. "She's found out that she cares," they told each other, as they made the house fast for the night.
They could hear Hildegarde moving about in her room. It was wonderful how those little echoes of her footsteps broke the loneliness which had bound them for so long.
Longing to hear again that lovely voice, Aunt Olivia called up the stairs: "Have you any ink?"