Gertrude came and bent over him with a soft caress.
"Say not so, dear father. God has preserved us all this while. Let us not distrust His love and goodness now."
"It might be the greater mercy," answered the Master Builder in a depressed voice. "I am too old to start life again with nothing but my broken credit for capital. As for you, child, your future is assured. I could leave you happy in that thought. You would want for nothing."
Gertrude raised her eyes wonderingly to her father's face. She had laid the sleeping child in its cot, and had taken a place at her father's feet.
"What mean you, father?" she asked. "I have only you in the wide world now. If you were to die, I should be both orphaned and destitute. What mean you by speaking of my future thus? Whom have I in the wide world besides yourself?"
The father passed his hand over her curly hair, and answered with a sigh and a smile:
"Surely, child, thou dost know by this time that the heart of Reuben Harmer is all thine own. He worships the very ground on which thou dost tread. His father and I have spoken of it. Fortune has dealt more kindly with our neighbours than with me. Good James Harmer has laid by money, while I have adventured it rashly in the hope of large returns. This calamity has but checked his work for these months; when the scourge is past, he will reopen business once more, and will find himself but little the poorer. He is a wiser man than I have been; and his wife and sons have all been helpful to him. The love of Reuben Harmer is my assurance for thy future welfare. Thou wilt never want so long as they have a roof over their heads.
"Nay, now what ails thee, child? Why dost thou spring up and look at me like that?"
For Gertrude's usually tranquil face was ablaze now with all manner of conflicting emotions. She seemed for a moment almost too agitated to speak, and when she could command herself there were traces of great emotion in her voice.
"Father, father!" she cried, "how can you thus shame me? You must know with what unmerited scorn and contumely Reuben was treated by poor mother when it was we who were rich and they who were (in her belief, at least) poor. She would scarce let him cross the threshold of our house. I have tingled with shame at the way in which she spoke of and to him. Frederick openly insulted him at pleasure. Every slight was heaped upon him; and he was once told to his very face that he might look elsewhere for a wife, for that my fortune was to win me the hand of some needy Court gallant. Yes, father, I heard with my own ears those very words spoken--save that the term 'needy' was added in mine own heart. Oh, I could have shrunk into the earth with shame. And after all this, after all these insults and aspersions heaped upon him in the day of our prosperity--am I to be made over to him penniless and needy, without a shilling of dowry? Am I to be thrown upon his generosity in my hour of poverty, when I was denied to him in my day of supposed wealth?