There were only four loaves, it is true, but to Brooke they stood for a definite power—her first direct productive work.
Choosing one from the rest and half wrapping it in a white towel, she carried it to her mother, who was sitting beside her father, whose chair was placed close by the sunny window. For the two days past his lips had moved, though inarticulately, and his wife was doubly on the alert for a single spoken word.
Holding the loaf before her as if it had been a trophy, Brooke crossed the room and, folding back the towel, the steaming odour of the bread reached her mother’s nostrils. Then she held out her hands to her daughter, taking the bread from her almost reverently.
“Watch father!” whispered Brooke.
There was a look of recognition struggling with other visions in his eyes, and strange incoherent sounds were formed on the struggling lips. His eyes fixed themselves on the loaf, which his wife held close. His nostrils quivered as if in unison with his other awakening senses. Brooke knelt by his chair, endeavouring to read sense in the vague sounds he uttered. There came a pause, a hush, and then, in hoarse, uncertain accents, unmistakable yet feeble at the close, Adam Lawton whispered two words, “New bread.”
Meanwhile, outside in the kitchen, warming himself by the stove, was the Cub, who, coming in from the cold and the exertion of rounding up refractory chickens after their morning sunning, had brought a keen appetite with him. Snatching a knife that lay on the table, he cut a thick crust from one of the loaves; this he hastened to spread with molasses from a jug in the pantry, and then stood with his back to the fire, taking great round bites with the wholesome gusto of six, instead of his old-time critical mouthing of surfeited dyspeptic discontent.
The surprise of the second week was a visit from Lucy Dean at its close. The excellent sleighing had filled many houses of both Stonebridge and Gordon for the week end, and shortly before noon of Saturday Brooke was sitting at the old desk in the living room, for which her added books had earned the name of library, writing her weekly letter to Lucy, when a shadow darkened the nearest window, and, looking up, she saw Lucy in the flesh, peering in at her with a serio-comic expression that Brooke knew of old to mean deep, real feeling. Bells had been jingling by the whole morning, so that those that had heralded her coming had passed unnoticed.
In an instant Brooke was at the door, and no one who saw the silent but emphatic meeting could ever after deny the possible existence of real friendship between women.
“Where did you drop from?”