She met the muffled figure halfway down the path, called to Nathan to take his team to the barn, where they would be out of the cutting wind, and bundled Susan Hornby into the house with little shrieks of delight and welcome.
Susan Hornby knew that she was wanted at the end of that five minutes.
“However could you know that I was wanting you so bad to-day?” Elizabeth said finally, as she thrust her guest down into a rocking chair and then went down on her knees to unfasten her overshoes.
“Land sakes! What are you trying to do—and you——” The sentence stopped and the speaker looked embarrassed.
Elizabeth, still on her knees, looked up. A soft blush covered her face as she gave a happy little laugh.
“Yes—it’s true,” she whispered. “Oh, Aunt Susan, I’m so happy!”
Outside, Nathan Hornby seized the opportunity to look around the barns.
“Good cattle sheds,” he remarked to himself. “Good bunch of pigs, too. I hope ’e ain’t goin’ into debt, as they say, but I swan, it looks like it.”
Nathan’s survey of the barns had given the two women inside the house time to talk over the affair so close to their hearts, and the little sitting room had been turned into a temple by the presence of a young mother that was to be and that older but childless mother who loved her as her own. Elizabeth, still on her knees, laid her head in Aunt Susan’s lap as of old, and Susan Hornby, with every hurt buried, listened to her confessions, with her free hand feeling its way over the thick braids as she prayed earnestly in her heart that her beloved child would go through the travail awaiting her without harm and not be left childless in her old age.
When Nathan’s heavy boot crunched on the snow-covered doorstep, Elizabeth ran to meet him with the broom and a whole world’s wealth of welcome in voice and manner.