“Yes.”
Her mother bent over her, looking at her slumbers with the soft eyes of love. How little she dreamed who had looked on her last! Then she went to Edwin, with perhaps less wistful anxiety in her countenance, but more of pride. She took off her things, to go down to supper. Norah saw her no more that night.
Beside the door into the passage, the sleeping-nursery opened out of Mr. and Mrs. Openshaw’s room, in order that they might have the children more immediately under their own eyes. Early the next summer morning Mrs. Openshaw was awakened by Ailsie’s startled call of “Mother! mother!” She sprang up, put on her dressing-gown, and went to her child. Ailsie was only half awake, and in a not uncommon state of terror.
“Who was he, mother? Tell me!”
“Who, my darling? No one is here. You have been dreaming love. Waken up quite. See, it is broad daylight.”
“Yes,” said Ailsie, looking round her; then clinging to her mother, said, “but a man was here in the night, mother.”
“Nonsense, little goose. No man has ever come near you!”
“Yes, he did. He stood there. Just by Norah. A man with hair and a beard. And he knelt down and said his prayers. Norah knows he was here, mother” (half angrily, as Mrs. Openshaw shook her head in smiling incredulity).
“Well! we will ask Norah when she comes,” said Mrs. Openshaw, soothingly. “But we won’t talk any more about him now. It is not five o’clock; it is too early for you to get up. Shall I fetch you a book and read to you?”
“Don’t leave me, mother,” said the child, clinging to her. So Mrs. Openshaw sate on the bedside talking to Ailsie, and telling her of what they had done at Richmond the evening before, until the little girl’s eyes slowly closed and she once more fell asleep.