There, in the golden sunset, they lay. The sun kissed their little faces, and touched with a loving hand their curly hair. It lingered lovingly round them, as if it knew that the lambs would be frisking when it rose again, the birds would welcome it with their glad song; but that never again would it rest on the nestling forms and clasped hands of the two little brothers!
Sir Everard, bending over them, saw a troubled expression over Humphrey's face.
"What can it be that ails the child?" he mentally questioned; "is it physical pain, or is something troubling his thoughts? Is the fear of death coming over him?"
He did not like to speak for fear of disturbing him, but as the look deepened almost to pain, he could not restrain himself any longer.
"Humphrey, my darling," he exclaimed, in his longing to do something, be it ever so little, to soothe his boy's dying hour, "what is it? What can I do for you?"
Nothing! With all his love and all his yearning, nothing!
For surging once more in the boy's brain is the noise as of rushing and singing, and with its sound a fear has risen in his breast. Shall he ever, ever catch the music of that wondrous song? Doubts of his own power to learn it are troubling his wandering thoughts; dim misgivings that children can not learn it, founded on his own inability to follow the singing in church. Always too soon or too late! Do children ever learn it? "'And no man could learn that song save the hundred and forty and four ...' nothing about children there!"
Vain is the father's endeavor to reach a trouble of this kind; vainly, bending over him, does he seek to discover its cause, in his longings to remove or alleviate it.
Is the child, then, to pass away uneasy, with a cloud upon his happiness; or must a miracle be worked in his favor? Must Heaven open and show him the army of innocents standing at the right hand of God? No. God's ways are not as our ways: infinite in power, He yet reveals Himself by the simplest means.
As once before He sent the child consolation so will He send it now. As once before, not by signs and wonders, but by the gift of sleep, so now, not by miracles and visions, but by the voice of his baby brother.