She closed her eyelids, and lay still, breathing heavily and fitfully; whilst all around her, her old neighbours looked on in mournful silence.
"He's long in coming," she murmured at last, "and it's growing dark, very dark. It's time to sing, 'Glory to Thee;' it 'll cheer him maybe, wherever he is. Only I can't begin."
"She wishes us to sing 'Glory to Thee,'" said Mrs. Clift, looking round at the circle of grave and sorrowful faces surrounding them; "she says it will cheer Ishmael; and it will, if he can only catch a distant sound of it. Some of you belong to the choir; please start it, for I cannot."
Her voice was broken and low; and for the first two or three lines the hymn was sung very tremulously by the villagers. But Ruth's eyes brightened, and a smile broke over her grey and withered face, as the familiar strain and the old words reached her dull ear. Her lips moved, and now and then the feeble whispering of a word or two was heard by the schoolmistress.
But when the "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow" had been sung in a loud, clear, hearty chorus of every voice, there came, in the silence that followed, a sound as of an echo repeating it in the winding galleries of the old quarry. Ruth lifted up her head, and with sudden strength raised herself to her feet, and leaned against the opening to listen.
"I can hear him," she said, joyously, "and I shall see him again! I bid him go, for I was afeared he hadn't forgiven Nutkin; but my heart went with him. He's the only one of 'em all as cares for their old mother; it's the way of young folks," she added, as if to excuse them herself; "but Ishmael was loth to leave me, for fear I should die afore he got back. But I'm here, Ishmael, my lad; I'm close beside thee. Thee and me 'll see each other again."
She sunk back slowly to the ground; and the neighbours gathered round her again. She was only a poor old toiling woman, for years well-known to them all, and little thought of; but there was not one of them who did not grieve for her, or say to themselves how they could have made her hard life a little easier for her. Nutkin knelt down beside her, and his red sunburnt face looked more full of life and health than ever beside her thin, pinched, pallid features.
"Ruth, forgive me!" he said. "I'd rather have had my right hand shot off, if I'd ha' known it before. It were my wicked hatred as did it. I'd ha' winked at any other lad robbing a pheasant's nest; but I hated the very name o' Medway."
"I never thought myself as there were anything to forgive," she answered. "It's the law, I know; and the justices are wise men. But Ishmael couldn't forgive it, not till now."
But before any one could speak again, there came a shout through the narrow opening, and the sound of a child's voice calling "Father."