But now I must go.”

She went with reluctant glances

         And footsteps slow.

 

She met at the very threshold

         Pale entering Doubt;

“Are you coming in,” she said,

         “As I go out?”

 

“We cannot visit together,”

         Doubt made reply;

“The heart that bids me enter,

         Bids you good by.”

 

A draft of “The Guests of the Heart” courtesy of the Ella Higginson Papers, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Heritage Resources, Western Washington University, Bellingham Washington.

“The Guests of the Heart” as it appears in Ella Higginson’s The Voice of April-Land (1903).

“The Guest of the Heart” as it appears in Ella Higginson: A Tribute (1941), a volume edited and printed by the Washington State Federation of Women’s Clubs in honor and memory of Higginson the year after her death.