‘Father is gettin’ so mortal queer,’ said Stephen discontentedly. ‘First he tells me to top-dress the upper lot, and then right off he wants me to harness up and go to the mill. I don’t see how a feller’s to know what to do. Most wish I’d gone West with Leander, it’s a free life there, and he’s his own master.’
‘“One is our Master, even Christ,”’ Pauline quoted softly. ‘Don’t go, Stephen, you and Lemuel are the only ones on the farm now, and father is getting old.’
She spoke sadly. She had noticed with a sinking heart how ‘queer’ her father was.
The years had slipped by until Polly was seventeen. A very frail little body she was, but always so patient and sweet, that Pauline never grudged the constant care.
Two of the boys had taken the shaping of their own lives and gone away, and Susan Ann had a home of her own with two little freckled-faced children to call her mother.
‘We’ll jog along together, Stephen,’ she said in her bright, cheery way. ‘Father forgets now and then, but he doesn’t mean any harm, and it’s only one day at a time, you know.’
Stephen looked at her admiringly.
‘You’re a brick, Pawliney, and I guess if you can stand it, I ought to be able to, with you round making the sunshine. I’d be a brute to go and leave you and Lem with it all on your shoulders’; and the honest, good-hearted fellow went in to give Polly a kiss before he started for the mill.
Clearing out an old trunk next day Pauline came across a soiled, tumbled envelope. It was the letter which Lemuel had tucked away and forgotten while he waited for her to ‘get mad.’
She opened it eagerly. It was from Richard Everidge.