‘Oh, Sam!’ she cried, with tears in her eyes, ‘do you think you will love them again?’
For a few minutes he sat still, looking earnestly at the notes, with a strange expression of fear upon his face. He compared the peace and happiness of the last few months with the heavy burden his secret had been to him. He thought of how he had begun to learn to think of God when he awoke in the morning, and when he was falling asleep at night. If he kept the money, would it be the same? Yet would it be right to throw away what God might intend them to keep as a provision against some time of need? Perhaps God saw the time was come when he might be trusted with money again.
‘Ann,’ he said, ‘If I thought these notes would tempt me to serve mammon again, I’d throw them all on to the fire yonder. You take charge of them, my lass, and put them into the Post-Office Savings-bank, that was opened a few months ago. Thank God I lost them, and thank God I’ve found them again.’
For the next few weeks Sam Franklin and his wife nursed and tended the dying man in the attic as tenderly as if he had been their brother, teaching him what Sam had learned himself, that even on a sick bed he might work the works of God, by believing on Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent. When he died, blessing them for their brotherly love to him, they took charge of little Bell, and no doubt spent as much upon her as the money laid by in the savings-bank. But she grew up like a daughter to them; and not long ago she became their daughter by marrying Johnny Franklin. The wedding took place a day or two before Christmas, the anniversary of the day when Johnny readily gave up his small fortune for little Bell.
‘Oh, Sam!’ said his wife, as she thought of it, ‘how would it have been if we’d kept the nine shillings to buy clothes for Johnny?’
‘We should have kept the nine shillings and lost the forty-five pounds,’ answered Sam. ‘It’s true, “He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.”’
‘Yes, but it’s more than that,’ said Ann; ‘we’d a chance of doing something like Jesus Christ would have done in our place, and we did it. That was the best of all.’
She saw the stranger produce a pistol.
See page 46.