“It isn’t that,” she sighed. She sat with shut, straight mouth. “I don’t know what’s going to become of us.”
But the clergyman had ground himself down so long, that he could not easily sympathize.
“Have you any trouble?” he asked.
“Ay, have I any trouble!” cried the elderly woman. “I shall end my days in the workhouse.”
The minister waited unmoved. What could she know of poverty, in her little house of plenty!
“I hope not,” he said.
“And the one lad as I wanted to keep by me——” she lamented.
The minister listened without sympathy, quite neutral.
“And the lad as would have been a support to my old age! What is going to become of us?” she said.
The clergyman, justly, did not believe in the cry of poverty, but wondered what had become of the son.