She smiled softly in his face.
“No,” she said, “not your love, Luke. My children. You will—for my sake—Luke?”
He could not speak, but clasped the little ones to his breast—partly in token of his silent vow—partly that they might not see Sage Mallow’s sun set, as the great golden orb sank in the west.
Death had his work to do at Lawford as elsewhere, and the sleepy little town was always waking up to the fact that some indweller had passed away.
It was about a week earlier that Polly Morrison sat waiting and working by her one candle, which shed its light upon her pleasant, comely face. The haggard, troubled look had gone, and though there were lines in her forehead, they seemed less the lines of care than those of middle age.
Every now and then she looked up and listened for the coming step, but there was only an occasional sough of the wind, and the hurried rush of the waters over the ford, for the stream was high, and the swirling pools beneath the rugged old willow pollards deep.
Polly heard the rush of the waters, and a shudder passed through her, for she recalled Jock Morrison’s threat about Cyril years ago.
This set her thinking of him and his end; from that she journeyed on in thought to Sage Mallow, the pale, careworn widow, slowly sinking into her grave; and this suggestive theme made the little matronly-looking body drop her work into her lap, and sit gazing at the glowing wood fire, wondering whether Mrs Mallow or Sage would die first, and whether Miss Cynthia, as she always called her, was soon coming down to Gatley so as to be near.
Then her thoughts in spite of herself went back to another death scene, and the tears gathered in her eyes as she saw once more that early Sunday morning, when the earth lay dark in a little mound beneath the willow, where a religiously-tended little plot of flowers always grew.
“I wish Tom would come back,” she said, plaintively. “It is so lonely when he has to go into town.”