At four Edwin had not appeared; Milly, having no imagination, had no anxiety; she merely gave up, patiently, the hope of a wordless good-bye. But she kept looking for him; and when she finally put on her things, she paused and turned back to the window, to look once more towards Old Chester; but there was no sign of Ned. It did not occur to her to postpone her plan; her mind, run into the mould of sacrifice, had hardened into rigidity. So at last, miserably, the tears running down her face, she stepped out into the cold and went down through the garden to the river. There she turned and looked back, with dumb passion in her eyes; the firelight was winking from the parlor windows and all the warm commonplace of life seemed to beckon her. She put her muff up to wipe her eyes, but she made no prayer or farewell; her silence had reached her soul by that time.
[Illustration: "THERE SHE TURNED AND LOOKED BACK"]
It was very cold; the ice was rough, and the wind had blown the dry snow about in light drifts and ripples, so that walking was not difficult. She trudged out, up towards the Bend, skirting the place where the men had been cutting. They had gone home now, and the ice about the black, open space of water was quite deserted. The wind came keenly down the river, blowing an eddy of snow before it; the bleak sky lay like lead over the woods along the shore. There was not a house in sight. Amelia Dilworth looked furtively about her; then she bent down and scraped at the snow on the edge of the ice, as one might do who, in the water, was struggling for a hold upon it. After that, for a long time, she stood there, looking dumbly at the current running, black and silent, between the edges of the ice. At last, her hand over her mouth to check some inarticulate lament, she stooped again, and put her little black muff on the broken snow close to the water.
When she reached Mrs. Kensy's she was quite calm. She said briefly that she had come to order some chickens; "--and I'll take that bundle I asked you to keep for me."
The woman brought it, and Milly tucked her fingers through the stout strings she had tied so carefully a few days before. When she would open it in the woods, and put on the new dress and shawl and the heavy veil that it held, and then, in the dark, take the half-past-five train, no one would know that Thomas Dilworth's wife had fled away into another State. They would find the muff, and they would think--there would be only one thing to think.