Annie Kilburn

MP3 Audio CD. Annie Kilburn

I.


After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They
had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on
from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them
home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn tacitly gave up the expectation of
getting her father away, though they both continued to say that they were
going to take passage as soon as the weather was settled in the spring.
At the date they had talked of for sailing he was lying in the Protestant
cemetery, and she was trying to gather herself together, and adjust her
life to his loss. This would have been easier with a younger person, for
she had been her father's pet so long, and then had taken care of his
helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was
like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained
with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to
receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he
was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the
end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom
and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully
cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother's death,
while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to
condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it
would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from
hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still
meant to go home.

“Why, my dear,” said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty
years, “this is home! You've lived in this apartment longer now
than the oldest inhab