"Yet think, dear Mrs Campbell, how he is spared the pain of seeing you suffer," said the doctor's wife, for it was she. "You love him well enough, I know, to enable you to think this, don't you?"
"Oh, yes! yes!" answered the dying wife. "God knows what is for our good. It may have saved him much pain and sorrow. Dear Alan!" and her voice grew very low. She was talking half to herself. Then, as the new thought flashed across, she said again aloud, "But what will become of Harry when I am gone, and Alan out at sea?"
And Harry, where he sat on the stairs in the deepening dusk, burst into tears. His mother's quick ears caught the sound of his sobs, and she exclaimed:
"Why, there is Harry crying on the stairs? Tell him to come in, will you, Mrs Bromley?"
Harry needed no telling. He was soon in the room, at his mother's bedside, and clasped in her arms.
"Don't cry, Harry, darling," the weak voice said. "Don't cry so!"
"You aren't really going to die, mamma? What shall I do without you?—all alone—and—and Dr Palmer won't believe me. I know he won't," sobbed Harry.
"Dr Palmer won't believe you? What is it, dear? and what is the matter with your face? Oh, Harry, you haven't been fighting, have you?" she added, and her voice bore shadow of reproach in it.
"Yes, mamma, I have," answered Harry, "but I didn't begin; they all set on me, and shied balls at me, and said I cribbed, and called me a liar and a coward, and I fought Warburton, and licked him," and then came the English schoolboy's triumphant glance, through his tearful eyes.
"Said you cribbed? When, dear? How?" asked Mrs Campbell. "Tell me all about it."