and she sprang up and dashed the bunch of grasses down, sweeping them into the fireplace where Gemmie had carefully laid a fire.
The vase was only a plain little thing from the five-and-ten-cent store, but it seemed to understand what was expected of it, and as Sherrill lifted the grasses swiftly from it, it toppled and rolled slowly, deliberately down upon the hearth and smashed into a thousand pieces.
Sherrill stood for an instant looking at it regretfully, almost as if it had a personality. Poor fragile thing! Too bad for it to lose its existence through no fault of its own. It had been part of a lovely bit of beauty, but at least now she would not have it around to remind her of the grasses and the day that they were picked!
She stooped and swept the pieces quickly with her little hearth broom into a newspaper, and wrapped them carefully, putting them into the wastebasket. Now they were gone. Even Gemmie wouldn’t be reminded to ask where the grasses were.
Then she touched a match to the fire, and it swept up and licked the grasses out of existence in one flash.
Sherrill turned to the room again. She mounted a chair and pulled down the pennant, stuffing it fiercely into the wastebasket. She snatched the bow of ribbon from the picture frame and dropped it into the fire. She caught up the bronze paperweight. That wouldn’t burn! Nor the ivory figurine! What could she do with them? Give them away? They might somehow come back to face her someday, and she wanted to be utterly rid of them. Ah! There was one place where she would never be likely to see them again. She might send them to Carter’s office. But no, that would be only to bring back to his mind the days they had had together, and that she did not want. She wanted only to sever all connection with him, to wipe out from both his memory and hers, insofar as was possible, all thought of one another. Then only would she be able to lift up her head and breathe freely again.
She unlocked a little secret drawer in her desk to put the bronze and ivory out of sight, and came on a packet of notes and brief letters from Carter. There hadn’t been many because he had been right there to see her every day. She had almost forgotten these letters and some programs and clippings. She seized them now and flung them into the middle of the fire, closing her eyes quickly that she might not see the flames licking around her name in that handwriting that had been so beloved, turning her back lest she should repent and snatch them out to read them over again. She must not! No, it would unnerve her! It would make her heart turn back and lash her for what she had done in giving her bridegroom over to another girl. She must not because he never had been hers! He was not worth the great love she had given him.
And now she remembered how unworthy she herself had felt to marry him, and how she had prayed and wondered. Was this awful thing that had happened in some mysterious way an answer to her prayer? Oh, it was all a mystery! Life itself was a mystery. Joy one minute and awful sorrow and desolation the next! Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow!
Suddenly from the next room through the closed door there came a burst of wild sweet song:
“When I have sorrow in my heart,
What can take it away?
Only Jesus in-ah my heart
Can take that sorrow away.”
It was Lutie, the fresh-cheeked young girl who came in certain days in the week to help with the cleaning. Lutie had the windows of the guest room open and was beginning her weekly cleaning. Sherrill’s windows were open, too, and that was why the words came so distinctly. But how strange that such words should come to her just now when she was so filled with sorrow!
Lutie was banging things around, drawing the bed out, and the bureau, setting chairs out of the way and running the vacuum cleaner over the floor. Sherrill could hear the thump as the cleaner hit the baseboards now and then. And Lutie’s voice rang out clear again in the next verse:
“When I have fear in-ah my heart, What can take it away? Only Jesus in-ah my heart Can take that fear away.”
Sherrill began slowly, languidly to