Long before it was light I rose. As I passed the boy's room Guy called out to me:
"Halloa! Uncle Phineas, is it a fine morning?—for I want to go down into the wood and get a lot of beech-nuts and fir-cones for sister. It's her birthday to-day, you know."
It WAS, for her. But for us—Oh, Muriel, our darling—darling child!
Let me hasten over the story of that morning, for my old heart quails before it still.
John went early to the room up-stairs. It was very still. Ursula lay calmly asleep, with baby Maud in her bosom; on her other side, with eyes wide open to the daylight, lay—that which for more than ten years we had been used to call "blind Muriel." She saw, now.
The same day at evening we three were sitting in the parlour; we elders only—it was past the children's bed-time. Grief had spent itself dry; we were all very quiet. Even Ursula, when she came in from fetching the boys' candle, as had always been her custom, and though afterwards I thought I had heard her going up-stairs, likewise from habit,—where there was no need to bid any mother's good-night now—even Ursula sat in the rocking-chair, nursing Maud, and trying to still her crying with a little foolish baby-tune that had descended as a family lullaby from one to the other of the whole five—how sad it sounded!
John—who sat at the table, shading the light from his eyes, an open book lying before him, of which he never turned one page—looked up at her.
"Love, you must not tire yourself. Give me the child."
"No, no! Let me keep my baby—she comforts me so." And the mother burst into uncontrollable weeping.