Those were the last words he ever spoke, for though he lingered for some hours it was in a kind of stupor, from which they could not rouse him.
Seeing that he could be of no further service, and remembering the careful Martha, who, he knew, was sitting up for him, armed with reproaches for the lateness of the hour, and various medicines as preventives for the cold he was sure to have taken, Mr. Sanford signified his intention to return home, and insisted that the boy Sam should not be awakened to drive him there.
The storm had ceased, the moon had come out, and he greatly preferred the walk, he said, even if the snow were deep. There were curious thoughts crowding in the brain of the grave, quiet man, tumultuous thoughts, which spanned a score of years and brought with them keen joy as well as a bitter pain. He was standing before the kitchen fire, with Hannah near him, holding the warm muffler he was to tie around his neck. Regarding her fixedly for a moment, he said, addressing her by the old pet name which had once been so familiar to him: "Hanny, that is why you said 'no' to me that summer night when we walked together under the chestnut trees, and I felt that you had broken my heart?"
Any one who saw Hannah Jerrold at that moment would have called her beautiful, with the sudden light which shone in her dark eyes, the bright color which, came to her cheeks, and the softness which spread itself all over her upturned face, as she answered, promptly, and still very modestly: "Yes, Charlie, that was the reason."
For an instant these two, whom a cruel fate had separated, looked into each other's eyes with a look in which the love of twenty years was embodied; then involuntarily the hands clasped, and the man and the woman who had walked together under the chestnut trees twenty years ago, kissed each other for the first time in their lives, she feeling that on her part there was nothing unwomanly, nothing wrong in the act, and he feeling that on his part there was not the shadow of infidelity to the woman who bore his name and looked so carefully after his welfare. The one was his wife, whom he respected greatly, and to whose wishes he sacrificed every wish of his own, when he could conscientiously do so; the other was the woman he had loved in the long ago, and whose "no," spoken so decidedly, and with no explanation except that it must be, had sent him from her with a heart-ache from which he now knew he had never fully recovered.