The gates ajar. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

The Gates Ajar. 43
crept into it and into her voice, but that was
all.
"I will tell you about it sometime, —perhaps," she added, rising and standing by the
fire. "Faith looks like him." Her eyes assumed their distant look, "like the eyes of
those who see the dead," and gazed away,so far away, into the fire, that I felt that she
would not be listening to anything that I
might say, and therefore said nothing.
We spent the evening chatting cosily. After
the fire had died down in the grate (I had
Phoebe light a pine-knot there, because I noticed that Aunt Winifred fancied the blaze in
the dining-room), we drew up our chairs into
the corner by the register, and roasted away to
our hearts' content. A very bad habit, to sit
over the register, and Aunt Winifred says she
shall undertake to break me of it. We talked
about everything under the sun, - uncles,
aunts, cousins, Kansas and Connecticut, the
surrenders and the assassination, books, pictures, music, and Faith, - 0, and Phoebe and
the cat. Aunt Winifred talks well, and does
not gossip nor exhaust her resources; one feels
always that she has material in reserve on
any subject that is worth talking about.