"We only wanted this, Helen," he whispered, as he bent over his wife, and kissed her pale forehead. "We shall be happy now."
A faint smile overspread Helen's countenance. "If it please God to spare the babe, I trust he will grow up to make us happy, Walter; but we must not forget our little Helen."
There was no danger of this, Walter replied. He loved his daughter very dearly; "but then," added he, repeating what he had often before said, "she is only a girl, and in the bush, girls don't count for so much as boys. All girls are not like what you were, and always have been. But never fear, I shall love our darling Helen all the better for her having a baby brother; and she, too, will be all the happier and better for having some one beside our two selves to care about and think about. And there will be enough and to spare for both when it pleases God to take us away," he concluded.
In truth, it would have been strangely unnatural if Walter had not loved his daughter very dearly. She was a fine-spirited girl, uniting in her character the sweetness and, at the same time, the firmness of her mother's temper, with the fearlessness and energy of her father. A bold rider from the age of five years, under his tuition, she had been accustomed to accompany him in his frequent excursions around the settlement; while, under her mother's eye, she had learned the more valuable lessons of patience, and love, and trust in God.
I am compelled to state, however, that Helen Wilson at fourteen was a very unaccomplished young person, and would have been looked upon by any average boarding school miss with whom she might have come into contact as extremely uncultivated, and indeed as shy and awkward even as John Tincroft himself had ever been. But this was of all the less consequence, seeing that at this time, boarding school misses had not found their way into the bush in any alarming number; and that as long as she could read a chapter in the Bible, to say nothing of other books in the small library at Sedley Station, with unimpeachable accuracy and sweetness of tone, write a letter (if she had had one to write) in a good, firm, though rather masculine, hand, and without any ungrammatical blunders, and use her needle with tolerable facility, her parents were quite satisfied with her accomplishments.
Now, however, the young Helen rejoiced in the anticipation of including the nursing of her baby brother in her list of attainments; but, alas! This anticipation was never fulfilled. For a few short days the mother and infant were considered to be making satisfactory progress; then fever came, and the bewildered husband was suddenly summoned to the bedside of his dying wife almost before he was aware that her life was in peril. And then the baby died. Let us draw a veil over poor Walter Wilson's agony of soul, and the grief of the now motherless and brotherless girl.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
JOHN TINCROFT AT HOME; AND THE SKELETON THERE.