CHAPTER XXII.
EMPTY PURSES.
It was not until Harold's life was really safe that his mother realized how very nearly he had been taken from her. But for Hinton's timely interposition, and the arrival of Doctor H—— at the critical moment, the face she so loved might have been cold and still now, and the spirit have returned to God who gave it.
Looking at the little sleeper breathing in renewed health and life with each gentle inspiration, such a rush of gratitude and over-powering emotion came over Mrs. Home that she was obliged to follow Hinton into his sitting-room. There she suddenly went down on her knees.
"God bless you," she said. "God most abundantly bless you for what you have done for me and mine. You are, except my husband, the most truly Christian man I ever met."
"Don't," said Hinton, moved and even shocked at her position. "I loved—I love the little lad. It is nothing, what we do for those we love."
"No; it is, as you express it, nothing to save a mother's heart from worse than breaking," answered Charlotte Home. "If ever you marry and have a son of your own, you will begin to understand what you have done for me. You will be thankful then to think of this day."
Then with a smile which an angel might have given him, the mother went away, and Hinton sat down to write to Charlotte. But he was much moved and excited by those earnest words of love and approval. He felt as though a laurel wreath had been placed on his head, and he wondered would his first brief, his first sense of legal triumph, be sweeter to him than the look in that mother's face this morning.
"And it was so easily won," he said to himself. "For who but a brute under the circumstances could have acted otherwise?"