Eunice shook her head, and her lips took a straighter curve, betraying the emotion she was so carefully keeping down. “It was midnight when my dream woke me, and so sure am I that it was sent as a warning, that I have not slept since—no, nor have I tasted food.”
“But surely that was a mistake, dear,” said Bertha, her tone reproachful now; for how could a person who had taken no breakfast keep an evenly balanced mind?
“I could not sleep nor eat for thinking how they would suffer, all these poor people here,” and the little postmistress moved her hand towards the groups of people who were passing into the church. “Do you realize it, Bertha? If the crop failed now, every one of these comfortable men and women would be ruined, just ruined!” and Eunice began to sob with hysterical violence.
Bertha acted promptly then. Asking Mrs. Smith to look after the children until she herself could get back, she bundled Eunice back home with more haste than ceremony, and insisted on putting her to bed.
“You are ill and worn out,” she said, with kindly severity. “To-morrow you will feel better, and then you will say that you were wrong to be so faithless. Can you not believe that if God permitted a disaster like the ruin of the wheat crop to fall on the district, He would give men strength to bear the trial—yes, and the women too?”
“He might do, and yet, why should He?” said Eunice, looking at Bertha with a strange intensity of expression. “Have you ever reflected that if the Almighty gives brains and judgment to the sons of men, He expects them to use these things?”
“Of course, or why should they be given?” queried Bertha.
“Very well. Then, to apply the theory to practice, every man who farms in this township knows that while wheat is by far the most paying crop, it is also more liable to disaster than many others, and yet in ten thousand acres of land in this district there is only of about a bare three hundred acres, that are not sown with wheat. So if disaster comes, men must know that they have only their own unwisdom to thank for their ruin.”
“Go to sleep now and leave it,” said Bertha soothingly. “After all, there is no sense in meeting trouble halfway, and if we get through safely this time, you shall go round the country next winter preaching a crusade in favour of mixed farming.”
“I don’t think that I can sleep, but it is good to lie still,” replied Eunice, who looked fearfully exhausted as if from severe mental struggle. Then she lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. Bertha watched by her for a little while, then finding that she was quiet, she stole away and hurried off to church; for she was not at all sure that the twins and Molly would behave with any sort of propriety if left to their own devices.