It remained still the one shadow in her career at Seaton.
Now especially, since Miss Beach's recent ill-health, the secret weighed heavily upon her.

She felt her aunt ought to know that the will was destroyed, so that she might take the opportunity of making another.
More than once she tried indirectly to refer to the subject, but it was a tender topic, and at the least hint Miss Beach's face would stiffen and her voice harden; the old barrier between them would rise up again wider than ever, and impossible to be spanned.

Winona would have been glad to do much for her aunt, but Miss Beach did not care to be treated as an invalid.

Like many energetic people, she refused to acknowledge that she was ill, and the acceptance of little services seemed to her a confession of her own weakness.

It is rather hard to have your kindly meant efforts repulsed, so Winona, finding that her offers of sympathy met with no response, drew back into her shell, and the two continued to live as before, on terms of friendship but never of intimacy.