"I think he will be good with me; let me take him, please," pleaded a sweet voice at her side.
Rose turned, and saw a lady dressed in black, whom she had not before noticed, extending her arms for Charley. Her face was sufficient to win confidence, and Rose accepted her offer. Handling him as only an experienced hand can handle a babe, she changed him with perfect ease from side to side, laid him now up on her shoulder, now down on her lap, without the slightest appearance of discomfort to herself.
Rose looked the thanks she could not speak; then, stupified with exhaustion and sorrow, she leaned back in the dark corner where she sat, and closed her eyes.
The lady made no attempt to draw her into conversation, but gazed lovingly upon Charley's face. Living sorrows, she had none; but on a little tombstone in a church yard far away, the stranger's foot paused as he read:
"OUR FRANK!"
Oh, how many visions of home joys and home sorrows, did those two little words call up!
Our Frank! More than one heart had bled when that little tombstone was reared, and though the hands which placed it there were far away, yet the little grave had ever its garland, or its wreath, for even stranger eyes involuntarily dropped tears, when they read,
"OUR FRANK."
And so Frank's mother sat gazing on Charley's little cherub face, and wondering what grief a mother could know, with her breathing babe beside her.
Pity us, oh God! for every heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith.