age as
well as of suffering on the Colonel's once smooth brow, and to change my
daily vigil into a custom of despair, rather than of hope. Time had also
leisure to rob us of much of our worldly goods and to make our continued
living in this grand old house, an act that involved constant care and
the closest economy. That we were enabled to preserve appearances to the
day that beheld the Colonel laid low by the final stroke of his dread
disease, was only due to the secret charity of a certain gentleman, who,
declaring he was indebted to us, secretly supplied me with means of
support.

"But of all this you care little.

"You had rather hear about the evening watch with its hopeful assurance,
'Yet another day and she will be here,' to be followed so soon by the
despairing acknowledgement, 'Yet another day and she has not come!' or
of those dark hours when the Colonel lay blank and white upon his
pillow, with his eyes fixed on the door which would never open to the
beating of a daughter's heart, while the gray shadow of an awful
resolution deepened upon his immovable face. What that resolution was I
could not know, but I feared it, when I saw what a sternness it gave to
his eye, what a fixedness to his set and implacable lip; and when in the
waning light of a certain December afternoon, the circle of neighbors
about his bed gave way to the stiff and forbidding form of Mr. Phelps, I
felt a thrill of mortal apprehension and only waited to hear the short,
'It shall be done,' of the lawyer to some slowly whispered command of
the colonel, to rise from my far off corner and stand ready to accost
Mr. Phelps as he came from the bedside of the dying man.

"'What is it?' I asked, rushing up to him as he issued forth into the
hall, and seizing him by the arm, with a woman's unreasoning
impetuosity. 'I have nursed his daughter on my knee; tell me, then, what
it is he has ordered you to do in this final moment?'

"Mr. Phelps for all his ungainly bearing, is not a hard-hearted man, as
you know, and he doubtless saw the depth of the misery that made me
forget myself. Giving me a look that was not without its touch of
sarcasm, he replied, 'The colonel has made me promise, to see that a
plank is nailed across the front door of this house, after his body has
been carried out to burial.'

"A board across the front door! His anger then was implacable. The
withering curse that had rung in my ears for ten years, was to outlive
his death!