And then there were children! No one need be very unhappy, it seemed to Sabine Bob, in a world where there were children. She never went out without first putting a few little hard, colored candies in her pocket to dispense along the street, over gates and on front steps. The tinier the children were the more she loved them. Every spring in Petit Espoir there was a fresh crop of the very tiniest of all; and towards these—little pink bundles of softness and helplessness—she felt something of the adoration which those old Wise Men felt who had followed the star. If she had had spices and frankincense, Sabine Bob would have offered it, on her knees. But in lieu of that, she brought little knitted sacques and blankets and hoods.
Such had been Sabine Bob's past; and that a day was to come in her life when a handsome young man should say sweet, loving things to her, present her with perfumery, bottle on bottle, ask her to be his wife, bless you, she would have been the first to scout the ridiculous idea—till six months ago! Thomas Ned was a small man, about forty, squarely built, with pink cheeks, long lashes, luxuriant moustache; a pretty man; a man who cut quite a figure amongst the girls and (many declared) could have had his pick of them. Why, why, had he chosen Sabine Bob? When she considered the question thoughtfully, she found answers enough, for she was not a girl who underestimated her own worth.
"Thomas is sensible," she explained to Mary Willee. "He knows better than to take up with one of those weak, sickly young things that have nothing but a pretty face and stylish clothes to recommend them. I can work; I can save; I can make his life easy. He knows he will be well looked out for."
If Mary Willee could have revised this explanation, she refrained from doing so. It would have taken courage to do so at that moment, for Sabine Bob was so happy! It was almost comical for any one to be so happy as that! Sabine realized it and laughed at herself and was happier still. Morning, noon, and night, during those first mad, marvelous days after she had promised to become Madame Thomas Ned, she was singing a bit of gay nonsense she had known from childhood:
Vive la Canadienne,
Vole, vole, vole, mon coeur!
"Fly, fly, oh fly, my heart," trolled Sabine Bob; and every evening, until the time came when he must depart for the pogey-fishing, in May, he had come and sat with her in the kitchen; he would smoke; she would knit away at a pair of mittens for him (oh, such small hands as that Thomas had!), and about ten o'clock she would fetch a glass of blueberry wine and some currant cookies. How nice it was to be doing such things for some one—of one's own!
She hovered over him like a ministering spirit, beaming and tender. This was what she had starved for all her life without knowing it: to serve some one of her own! Not for wages now; for love! She flung herself on the altar of Thomas and burned there with a clear ecstatic flame.
And now that he had been away four months, pogey-fishing, she would sometimes console herself by getting out the five picture-postcards he had sent her and muse upon the scenes of affection depicted there and pick out, word by word, the brief messages he had written. With Mary Willee's assistance she had memorized them; and they were words of sempiternal devotion; and there were little round love-knows-what's in plenty; and on one card he called her his little wife; and that was the one she prized the most. Wife! Sabine Bob!
That no card arrived in answer to her August letter did not surprise her, for the pogeymen often did not put into port for weeks at a time; and anyhow the day was not far away, now, when the season would be over and those who had gone up from Petit Espoir would come down again.
So the weeks slipped by. October came. The pogey-fishermen returned.