He could never make shift to get on, the neighbours further said, all by himself, with two boys to look after.
That was true enough. He pondered over it in his silent way for many a day, and at last he made up his mind.
Late one evening White Billy came slowly under the archway, and in the cart beside my father, who had been away for a day and a half, sat a little old woman, with a very big black bonnet and a red cloak. My father called me.
'Willie, here's your grandmother.'
And the little old woman got down slowly from the cart, and said,
'Dear, dear! Is this your boy, Stephen?'
'Yes, mother.'
The name sounded strange from my father's lips, strange and sad too, for he used to call my mother, 'mother.' It was odd and perplexing to me altogether, that my father should begin to have a mother just when I had lost mine. I stared hard at my grandmother. She had come to stay, I soon found out,—come to take care, my father said, of me and of the house.
'And of Cuthbert,' I said, jealously.
My father only nodded, but that was consent enough to satisfy me.