Abel glanced at her with a perplexed and anxious frown on his brow. "You ought to be patient with her condition," he said. His own patience was inexhaustible, and its root, as Blossom had suspected, lay in his remorseful indifference. With Molly he had not been patient, but he had loved her.
"Don't talk to me about patience," rejoined Sarah, "haven't I had nine an' lost six?"
She was entirely without the sentiment which her son felt regarding the physical function of motherhood, for like the majority of sentiments, it had worn thin when it had been stretched over a continual repetition of facts. To Abel the mystery was still shrouded in a veil of sympathy, and was hardly to be thought of without tenderness. But his solicitude merely nettled Sarah. Nobody had ever "carried on" over her when she had had her nine.
"Have you said anything sharp to her to-day, mother?" he inquired suspiciously, after a minute.
"You know I ain't, Abel. She left a dirty glass in the dairy an' I never so much as mentioned it. Did Mr. Mullen complain of her leavin' off mission work?"
"Why, of course not. He talked to us only a few minutes and he seemed absent-minded. He's had a good call somewhere in the North, and he told us that he had prayed over it unceasingly and he believed that the Lord was directing him to larger fields."
"Did Judy hear that?"
"Yes, he told us both."
Sarah was stirring the gruel, and she appeared so absorbed in her task that the remark she let fall a minute later bore presumably no relation to the conversation.
"I sometimes think men ain't got any mo' sense than an unborn babe!" she observed.