When they had all gone, Horace locked the back door, after filling an
old yellow and bronze glazed pitcher, which bric-a-brac hunters would
have struggled for, at the well, as he had done every night during his
boyhood, he left it on the hall table, and going out the front way to the
garden, walked up and down the long straight walk, between the sweet peas
and rose bushes, for more than an hour, until, having fought to no
conclusion the battle into which a new foe had entered, he returned to
the house and went noiselessly to his room.
Here, in place of the confusion he had left, quiet and order reigned. All
his clothes were laid away in their old places. He had but to reach his
hand inside the closet, the door of which hesitated before opening in its
familiar way, to find his night gear; the sheets were turned down at the
exact angle, and the pillows arranged one crosswise, one upright, as he
liked them,--his mother's remembering touch was upon everything.
He undressed without striking a light, and lay down, only to look
wakefully out at the dark lattice of tree branches against the moonlit
sky. Presently a step sounded on the stairs and paused at his partly open
door. He raised himself on his elbow, and peering through the crack saw
his mother standing there in night-dress and short sack, shading the
candle with her hand as she used when he was a little chap, to make sure
that he was safe asleep and had not perhaps crept out the window to go
coon hunting with the bigger boys,--a proceeding his father always winked
at, but which she feared would lead him to overdo and get a fever.
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