Deep into the heart of them she made her way; and there, in the green silence, broken only by the note of a thrush and the stirring of June leafage above and about her, she knelt and poured out her sorrow-filled heart before God, and cast upon Him the intolerable burden that had rested so long upon her soul.
The shadows were lengthening when at last she turned homewards. Cherry and Budd met her in the pasture, for Rose had grown anxious and sent them to find her.
"Why, where have you been, Martie?" exclaimed the twins. "We were so frightened about you, because you didn't come home."
"You need n't have been; I 've been talking with a Friend." And more than that she never said. The children's curiosity was roused, but when they told Rose and asked her what mother meant, Rose's eyes filled with tears, and she kept silence; for she alone knew with Whom her mother had talked that June afternoon.
"Run ahead, Budd, and tell Malachi to harness up Bess. I want him to take a letter down to the village so that it may go on the night mail." Budd flew rather than ran; for there was a look in his mother's face that he had never seen before, and it awed him.
That night a letter went to Doctor Heath, a famous nerve specialist of New York City. It was a letter from Mary Blossom, his old-time friend and schoolmate in the academy at Barton's River. In it she asked him if he would give her his advice in this case, saying she could not accept the decision of the physician and surgeon unless it should be confirmed by him.
"I cannot pay you now," she wrote, "but it was borne in upon me this afternoon to write to you, although you may have forgotten me in these many years, and I have no claim of present friendship, even, upon your time and service; but I must heed the inner command to appeal to you, whatever you may think of me,--if I disobeyed that, I should be disobeying God's voice in my life,"--and signed herself, "Yours in childhood's remembrance."
The next day a telegram was brought up from the village; and the day after the Doctor himself followed it.
It was an anxious week; but the wonderful skill conquered. The pressure on a certain nerve was removed, and for the last six months Benjamin Blossom had been slowly but surely coming back to his old-time health and strength. But again this winter the extra help had been necessary, and it had taxed all Mary Blossom's ingenuity to make both ends meet; for there was the interest on the mortgage to be paid every six months, and the ready money had to go for that.
In the midst of her thoughts, her recollections and plans, she caught the sound of sleigh-bells. The tall clock was just striking ten. Smoothing every line of care and banishing all look of sadness from her face, she met her husband with a cheery smile and a, "I 'm so glad you 've got home, Ben; it's just twenty below, and the molasses tea is ready for you and Chi."