Corona shivered yet over the bitterness of that time . The Gordons never did anything half-heartedly . The strife between the two brothers was determined and irreconcilable . Corona 's father forbade her to speak to her uncle and cousin or to hold any communication with them . Corona wept and obeyed him . She had always obeyed her father ; it had never entered into her mind to do anything else . Meredith had resented her attitude hotly , and from that day they had never spoken or met , while the years came and went , each making a little wider and more hopeless the gulf of coldness and anger and distrust . Ten years later Roderick Gordon died , and in five months Alexis Gordon followed him to the grave . The two brothers who had hated each other so unyieldingly in life slept very peaceably side by side in the old Gordon plot of the country graveyard , but their rancour still served to embitter the lives of their descendants . Corona , with a half-guilty sense of disloyalty to her father , hoped that she and Meredith might now be friends again . He was married , and had one little daughter . In her new and intolerable loneliness Corona 's heart yearned after her own people . But she was too timid to make any advances , and Meredith never made any . Corona believed that he hated her , and let slip her last fluttering hope that the old breach would ever be healed . `` Oh , dear ! oh , dear ! '' she sobbed softly into her pillows . It seemed a terrible thing to her that one of her race and kin was to be married and she could not be present at the ceremony , she who had never seen a Gordon bride . When Miss Corona went downstairs at last , she found Charlotta sobbing in the kitchen porch . The small handmaiden was doubled up on the floor , with her face muffled in her gingham apron and her long braids of red hair hanging with limp straightness down her back .
When Charlotta was in good spirits , they always hung perkily over each shoulder , tied up with enormous bows XXXXX sky-blue ribbon .
In after at between down into of on over that