“Did you do well by your hauling, Gilbert,” she asked, “and are you now home for the summer?”
“Until after corn-planting,” he answered. “Then I must take two or three weeks, as the season turns out. I am not able to give up my team yet.”
“But you soon will be, I hope. It must be very lonely for your mother to be on the farm without you.”
These words touched him gratefully, and led him to a candid openness of speech which he would not otherwise have ventured,—not from any inherent lack of candor, but from a reluctance to speak of himself.
“That's it, Martha,” he said. “It is her work that I have the farm at all, and I only go away the oftener now, that I may the sooner stay with her altogether. The thought of her makes each trip lonelier than the last.”
“I like to hear you say that, Gilbert. And it must be a comfort to you, withal, to know that you are working as much for your mother's sake as your own. I think I should feel so, at least, in your place. I feel my own mother's loss more now than when she died, for I was then so young that I can only just remember her face.”
“But you have a father!” he exclaimed, and the words were scarcely out of his mouth before he became aware of their significance, uttered by his lips. He had not meant so much,—only that she, like him, still enjoyed one parent's care. The blood came into his face; she saw and understood the sign, and broke a silence which would soon have become painful.
“Yes,” she said, “and I am very grateful that he is spared; but we seem to belong most to our mothers.”
“That is the truth,” he said firmly, lifting his head with the impulse of his recovered pride, and meeting her eyes without flinching. “I belong altogether to mine. She has made me a man and set me upon my feet. From this time forward, my place is to stand between her and the world!”
Martha Deane's blood throbbed an answer to this assertion of himself. A sympathetic pride beamed in her eyes; she slightly bent her head, in answer, without speaking, and Gilbert felt that he was understood and valued. He had drawn a step nearer to the trial which he had resolved to make, and would now venture no further.