He might well ask; for Sophy was lying limp and white across the baby’s cot. Poor little Sophy! The reaction from those terrible fears—the doubt that her father had forgotten them, and the fear of what might become of them all—was too much for her, weakened as she was by anxiety and want of food. She had borne her burden well, but her strength failed her when it was lifted off. It was only for a moment. As Stephen lifted her on the bed, she opened her eyes, and smiled.
“Mother, dear, it is nothing,—only I’m so glad.” Her eyes closed again wearily.
“That ain’t just the way my folks show how glad they be,” said Stephen, as she turned her face on her pillow to hide her happy tears.
“She’s hungry,” said Ned, gravely. “There wasn’t much; and she didn’t eat any dinner yesterday—nor much supper.”
“Now I know you’ll have nothing to say to me,” said Stephen. “These things—the most of them, at least—might have been here, as well as not, the night your husband went away, if I had done my duty, as I promised.”
“Thank God!” she murmured as she grasped Stephen’s hand. “He did not forget us. The rest is as nothing.”
“And,” continued Stephen with a face which ought to have been radiant, but which was very far from that, “the very last word he said to me that night, when I bade him good-bye, was, ‘I’ll hold on to the end.’”
And, having said this, Stephen seemed to have nothing more to say. He betook himself to the preparation of dinner with a zeal and skill that put all Sophy’s attempts to help him quite out of the question. How the dinner was enjoyed need not be told. Breakfast the boys called it, in scornful remembrance of the gruel. There were very bright faces round the table. The only face that had a shadow on it was Stephen’s; and that only came when he thought no one was looking at him. He was in a great hurry to get away, too, it seemed.
“For the roads are awful; and you may be thankful, little Sophy, that you hadn’t to go to Littleton to-night. I started to bring the things on a hand-sled, but would never have got through the drifts if it hadn’t a’ been for Farmer Jackson and his oxen. Don’t you try it yet a while. I’ll be along again with Dolly one of these days.”
Stephen Grattan’s face might have been brighter, as he turned to nod to the group of happy children watching his departure at the door of the log cottage. The “good-byes” and the “come agains” sent after him did make him smile a little, but only for a moment. The shadow fell darker and darker on his face, as he made his way through the scarcely-open road in the direction of the village. For Stephen’s heart was very heavy, and with good cause. Sad as had been his first sight of the sorrowful mother and her children, he had seen a sadder sight that day. In the dim grey of the bitter morning he had caught a glimpse of a crouching, squalid figure hurrying with uncertain yet eager steps—whither? His heart stood still as he asked himself the question, “To the foot-bridge over Deering Brook? To the gaping hole beyond?”