As the dark stormy days passed on he sometimes put a touch or two to the outstretched wings of his swooping hawk, but it did not get on fast. With a pathetic clinging to Phebe he seldom let her stay long out of his sight, but followed her about like a child, or sat on the hearth watching her as she went about her house-work. Only by those unconscious sobs and outcries, inaudible to himself, did he betray the grief that was gnawing at his heart. Very often did Phebe put aside her work, and standing before him ask such questions as the following on her swiftly moving fingers.
"Don't you believe in God, our Father in heaven, the Father Almighty, who made us?"
"Yes," he would reply by a nod.
"And in Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord, who lived, and died for us, and rose again?"
"Yes, yes," was the silent, emphatic answer.
"And yet you grieve and fret over the loss of money!" she would say, with a wistful smile on her young face.
"You are a child; you know nothing," he replied.
For without a sigh the old man was going forward consciously to meet death. Every morning when the dawn awoke him he felt weaker as he rose from his bed; every day his sight was dimmer and his hand less steady; every night the steep flight of stairs seemed steeper, and he ascended them feebly by his hands as well as feet. He could not bring himself to write upon his slate or to spell out upon his fingers the dread words, "I am dying;" and Phebe was not old or experienced enough to read the signs of an approaching death. That her father should be taken away from her never crossed her thoughts.
It was the vague, mournful prospect of soon leaving her alone in the wide world that made his loss loom more largely and persistently before the dumb old man's mind. Certainly he believed all that Phebe said to him. God loved her, cared for her, ordered her life; yet he, her father, could not reconcile himself to the idea of her being left penniless and friendless in the cold and cruel world. He could have left her more peacefully in God's hands if she had those six hundred pounds of his earnings to inherit.
The sad winter wore slowly away. Now and then the table-land around them put on its white familiar livery of snow, and old Marlowe's dim eyes gazed at it through his lattice window, recollecting the winters of long years ago, when neither snow nor storm came amiss to him. But the slight sprinkling soon melted away, and the dun-colored fog and cloudy curtain shut them in again, cutting them off from the rest of the world as if their little dwelling was the ark stranded on the hill's summit amid a waste of water.