Jem got up, and walked about the room in despairing impatience. She would not understand his feelings. At last he stopped right before the place where she was sitting, with an air of injured meekness on her face.
"Mother! I often think what a good man father was! I've often heard you tell of your courting days; and of the accident that befell you, and how ill you were. How long is it ago?"
"Near upon five-and-twenty years," said she, with a sigh.
"You little thought when you were so ill you should live to have such a fine strapping son as I am, did you now?"
She smiled a little, and looked up at him, which was just what he wanted.
"Thou'rt not so fine a man as thy father was, by a deal!" said she, looking at him with much fondness, notwithstanding her depreciatory words.
He took another turn or two up and down the room. He wanted to bend the subject round to his own case.
"Those were happy days when father was alive!"
"You may say so, lad! Such days as will never come again to me, at any rate." She sighed sorrowfully.
"Mother!" said he at last, stopping short, and taking her hand in his with tender affection, "you'd like me to be as happy a man as my father was before me, would not you? You'd like me to have some one to make me as happy as you made father? Now, would you not, dear mother?"