The testing of Janice Day

by Helen Beecher Long

As Janice had said, little Lottie was perfectly delighted at the prospect of having “Mamma ’Rill,” as she was determined to call her father’s new wife, “for her very own.” For although she was by no means as lonely, now that she could see and hear and speak almost as well as other little girls of her age, the Drugg household suffered for the presence of capable feminine hands and a loving heart.

Lottie had been used to run to her father for everything; but she was getting to that age now where it was a woman’s help she often needed.

Father and daughter still spent many an hour together, she with her cheek against his shoulder, while he sawed away at his old violin. The talent of his music-teacher father had been inherited to a degree by Hopewell; only he had always been too busy making a living to have the talent developed.

So he only knew the old pieces that he had learned when he was a boy and had first found the ancient violin hidden away by his mother in the attic. She had considered it almost a sin to play the instrument. Her husband, she thought, had been a failure because of his devotion to this very violin. She had looked back upon the days when they were first married, and he had spent hours pouring out his soul to her through the strings of the instrument, as wickedness for which she must ever do penance in this life.

As Hopewell Drugg remembered her, his mother had been a very austere woman and had striven to repress every tendency in him toward life or enjoyment. But once having found his father’s old violin, and learning that he could draw a certain kind of harmony from its strings, he refused to give it up. It was the one conflict of their existence together; his mother had gone to her grave without forgiving him for his devotion to music.

His marriage to Lottie’s mother had been a strange one, and his happiness, if there had been happiness at all, was brief. “’Cinda Stone,” as the neighbors had always called Lottie’s mother, was sickly and her married life had been a short one. Since then, until recently, Hopewell’s affections had seemed to be centered entirely in little Lottie. It was to her he played “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” And he still played it to her when the snow kept the child indoors.

Storm after storm charged upon Polktown from over the mountain-peaks or from across the lake. The streets had to be dug out after each snowfall by strings of slow-moving oxen dragging the heavy snowplows. The country roads were almost impassable. Once Janice had to remain with Mrs. MacKay over Sunday. Archie was still engaged in the bank, although it was closed while the finances of the institution were being adjusted.

Janice’s absence from town increased Lottie’s loneliness. Often the older girl had stopped on her return from school, to visit with the storekeeper’s daughter. Lottie did not go to school herself, but had lessons for two hours each forenoon under Miss ’Rill’s oversight.

After that the hours hung heavily on her hands. She could slide down hill, past Mr. Cross Moore’s; but the other children were in school and it wasn’t much fun to play alone. So, one afternoon, she left her sled at the bottom of the hill and tramped over the hard snow to the frozen cove, where the half-wrecked dock thrust its ice-covered timbers out from the shore. The line of dark spruce on the farther shore—the wall against which her voice was thrown back when she called—was snow-covered, too. And here were more flakes falling.

But little Lottie knew no danger. She was almost in sight of home. Or she would have been had not the snowflakes been coming down so fast and thick between her and the hill on which she lived.