“It’s him,” said Deborah to herself, sitting up in bed to hear the thud of feet.
How helpless, how terribly silent was the entrance now! And he never came upstairs to kiss them nor to say how he’d fared whilst he had been away.
No. And they didn’t jump out of bed and look over the banister, nor call to him. No, it was all different now.
Yet last week at this time he’d been alive and moved about this very house, contemplating in all seriousness and desperation his own approaching death.
Two days later they took him away again in the dark, cold morning.
“It isn’t him,” cried Deborah, inwardly. “He could never die. I can’t live without him. He was everything to me. I don’t believe he could die. He was too great and good to ever die.”
There came another piece of news.
The farmer had been the sole trustee for £700.
But when inquiries were made for it at the bank it was found that it had gone.
There then lay the explanation of these two last seeming prosperous years.