“I didn’t expect so much,” he said. “It was my child’s hands that gave them their value to me.”
Tears ran down his cheeks. He tried to restrain them, and to hide that he must wipe them with his sleeve.
The lady slipped a folded handkerchief into his hand. “Farewell, and take comfort,” she said hastily. “God will provide.”
She turned to a man who had followed, and paused near her.
“Find out who he is, what he is, and where he lives, and tell me as soon as possible,” she said in a low voice.
The same evening, in a suburb of the city: a little unpainted cottage, black with age, set on a raw clay bank. A railroad has undermined the bank and carried away the turf.
A faint light showed through one window. In a room with a bed in one corner an elderly woman was making tea at a small open fire of sticks. In the adjoining kitchen Boreas reigned supreme. All the warmth that they could have was gathered in this room, where the child also would sleep on an old lounge.
She sat in the corner of the chimney now, wistfully watching the preparations for supper.
In the other corner sat her grandfather. He had taken a blanket from the bed and wrapped it round him. He was shivering.
“It was hard to part with the flowers,” the man was saying. “They were all that we have left of her! But to a person like that,—a lady, a Christian, an angel!—it seemed like giving them to a friend who will keep them more safely than we can.” He choked, and wiped his eyes.