lower lot was sold, and she had kept it for Hildegarde. They, too, thought she ought to go to her father. They would miss her dreadfully, but the farm was no place for a young girl. And, of course, if she found she could not stay, she could come back.
At last Aunt Olivia went upstairs and came down with a traveling bag. "It was your mother's."
Louis Carew had bought it for Elizabeth on their wedding journey. It was lined with rose-color and outfitted with ivory with the monogram in gold letters.
"Everything he gave her was like that," Catherine said. "Handsome. We had never seen such handsome things as she brought back with her. Yet she said they were nothing to what she left behind."
"If he had given her more love, she would have liked it better than anything that money could buy," was Aunt Olivia's grim response. "I couldn't ever forgive him, although she didn't want us to feel that way. He broke her heart."
Hildegarde wondered if she ought to feel as Aunt Olivia did, and Crispin. Yet, somehow, she couldn't hate her father. Her mother hadn't hated him. Whatever she had suffered, she had loved him to the end.
