“’Cause she can’t bear it, my dears. She can’t, indeed. It ’most kills her to hear it mentioned. And no wonder. Them tender Southern girls as has never been used to anything but love and softness and sweetness all their lives, to be suddenly thrown upon a rough, hard, bitter world, you know, my dears, it is very trying. We must never speak to her about the past, and never breathe a word before her about the war. I dare say her poor father was killed in battle, or died in one of them military prisons, or something like that, which it breaks her heart to think about. We must just try to make her forget it, my dears,” concluded Mrs. Downie.
And her sympathetic hearers promised all she required, and from that time emulated each other in their kindness to the young stranger.
Mrs. Downie’s household were in some respects a peculiar people, of whom the gentle landlady was the controlling spirit.
One word about Sophie Downie. She had been a wife, and was now a widow only in name.
Her late husband, William Downie, had been a Methodist minister of sincere piety and much eloquence.
They had been neighbors’ children in a country village, and had been engaged to each other almost from their childhood.
He was “called” to the service of the Lord from his boyhood, and the two widows, Sophie’s mother and his own mother, had joined their slender means to send him to college, to be educated for the ministry.
“For,” said his own mother, “he is all that I have in the world, and why shouldn’t I spend all that I can on him?”
“And,” said Sophie’s mother, “he is just the same as my own son, and he’ll marry Sophie and take care of me when I get old, so why shouldn’t I spend all that I can spare in helping him?”
So the boy was sent to college, and in due time went honorably through his course, graduated and was ordained.