“Oh, yes!” There was a bright look in the eyes for once.
“And you love him all the same?”
“Oh, yes.”
So it was. Sampson Snow, with love enough in his heart for half a dozen children, had none of his own, and it was all lavished on this child of his wife, and she loved him dearly. But they did not have “good times” up at their house the little girl confided to Graeme.
“Mother is sick most of the time, and grandma is cross always; and, if it wasn’t for father, I don’t know what we should do.”
Indeed, they did not have good times. Old Mrs Snow had always been strong and healthy, altogether unconscious of “nerves,” and she could have no sympathy and very little pity for his son’s sickly wife. She had never liked her, even when she was a girl, and her girlhood was past, and she had been a sorrowful widow before her son brought her home as his wife. So old Mrs Snow kept her place at the head of the household, and was hard on everybody, but more especially on her son’s wife and her little girl. If there had been children, she might have been different; but she almost resented her son’s warm affection for his little step-daughter. At any rate she was determined that little Emily should be brought up as children used to be brought up when she was young, and not spoiled by over-indulgence as her mother had been; and the process was not a pleasant one to any of them, and “good times” were few and far between at their house.
Her acquaintance with the minister’s children was the beginning of a new life to Emily. Her father opened his eyes with astonishment when he came into Janet’s bright kitchen that night and heard his little girl laughing and clapping her hands as merrily as any of them. If anything had been needed to deepen his interest in them all, their kindness to the child would have done it; and from that day the minister, and his children, and Mrs Nasmyth, too, had a firm and true friend in Mr Snow.