‘Father,’ she cried, ‘are you ill? Speak, father, speak!’
The face—the dear old face that had never frowned on her—lay on the pillow still, though the sun was high. There was a sweet smile on it, sueh as she had often seen there in the days before their troubles came. It was a calm, happy face that Bess gazed upon that morning, and well it might be, for all the old lodge-keeper’s troubles were over at last. The poverty he had dreaded would never come upon him now. The labour he had nerved himself for he would never be called upon to do. God had willed it otherwise, and had called him home to rest.
Who shall say that that night in his dreams fancy had not touched his eyelids with her fairy fingers and bidden him see the old happy home-life once again?
He had died in his sleep with a smile upon his honest face.
And the woman who clasped the cold hand, and knelt by the little bed and sobbed, was henceforth alone in the world.
CHAPTER XLV.
A FRIEND IN NEED.
Mrs. Adrian never read the newspaper herself. Her eyes ‘were not what they used to be,’ and she declined to avail herself of the artificial aid of glasses. She had tried spectacles at first, but she had always been laying them down and losing them, or treading on them and breaking them.
Mrs. Adrian’s spectacles had been a fearful source of trouble to the whole family. If she lost them, Ruth was started all over the house on a tour of exploration, and Mrs. Adrian was always quite sure that she had put them in sueh and such a place, and somebody must have moved them. As a rule, they were found in close proximity to the owner. She usually hid them in her lap under her work, or shut in the book she had been reading. One night the entire household were kept up till two in the morning. Mrs. Adrian without her spectacles and her temper at the same time vowed she would not go to bed till the glasses were found. Under the circumstances, Ruth and Mr. Adrian felt bound to share her vigil, and they joined the servants in a room-to-room and corner-to-corner visitation. Mrs. Adrian sat in her easy-chair, and resolutely refused to budge till her spectacles were found. She wouldn’t lose them for the world. It was fortunate that she did move at last, for she had been sitting on the spectacles all the time.
When they were broken and sent to be repaired, they always came back with glasses that didn’t suit—at least Mrs. Adrian always declared so. At last, one day, after breaking a pair, which had been lost for nearly a week and had eventually turned up in the flour-barrel, where Mrs. Adrian had dropped them while on a tour of inspection through the larder, the good lady vowed and declared that she’d never wear another pair as long as she lived, and she did there and then incontinently fling the damaged pair out of the window in a temper, much to the astonishment of the vicar of the parish, who was passing at the time, and who, bowing politely to the mistress of the house, received the ejected spectacles in the hollow of his hat.
Mrs. Adrian kept her word, and without much sacrifice on her part, for her eyesight was still fairly good, and she could do her knitting and her darning without glasses.