Matilda Randall was not at communion on the next Sabbath. She was "down sick at her father's," the women said, and they thought it hard that she should be absent when Alex joined the church.
"I don't doubt it's been quite a cross to her, the way he's held out," one of them remarked; "and it seems a pity she couldn't have been there to partake with him the first time."
But the weary woman, lying so still in her old room in her father's house, had a heavier cross.
Her mother tiptoed into the room, the morning after her arrival, and stood beside her until she opened her eyes.
"Elick is outside, Matildy. Shall I tell him to come in?"
She shook her head, and closed her eyes again wearily.
The old woman went out, and confronted her gray-haired husband helplessly.
"It beats me, Josiah, what he could 'a' said or done that she's took to heart so, after what she's put up with all these years."
Mr. Anderson preached the funeral sermon very touchingly, when it was all over. The tears came into his young eyes, and there were treacherous breaks in his rhetoric as he talked.