BEFORE she slept that night, Hildegarde wrote to Crispin—a homesick letter. She felt he would understand her longing, her loneliness in her new surroundings. Since, for the moment, her longing included Crispin, she let him see it.
"It is wonderful here, and in a way I like it. But there is no one to whom I can talk as I used to talk to you. I feel as if all the people around me are on a stage, and that I am watching them."
When she had finished the letter, she went to bed, and lay awake for a long time in the moonlight. Writing to Crispin had given her a renewed sense of nearness to her mother, and she felt, too, secure in the thought of her lover's strength and love. Whatever happened, she had that. Instinctively she knew that she could not lean too heavily for love upon her father.
The next morning, when she went down, she found that she was to go to Baltimore to be outfitted by Miss Anne Carew, the remaining sister of the two who had been kind to young Elizabeth. Miss Nancy was dead, and Miss Anne still lived in the old house near the cathedral.
"The house belongs to her," Louis Carew told his daughter. "She wanted to give it up to help me out,
