It was a sad disappointment to Adah, and without knowing what she was doing, she sank down upon the sofa, and involuntarily laying her head in Mrs. Richards' lap, cried bitterly, her tears bringing answering ones from the eyes of all three of the ladies, for they half believed her grief, in part, was for the lifeless form in the room below.
"Poor child, you are tired and worn. It is hard to lose him just as there was a prospect of perfect reconciliation with us all," Mrs. Richards said, softly smoothing the brown tresses lying on her lap, and thinking even then that curls were more becoming to her daughter-in-law than braids had been, but wondering why, now she was in mourning, Adah had persisted in wearing them.
"Pretty girl, pretty turls, is you tyin'?" and won by her distress, Willie drew near, and laid his baby hand upon the curls he thought so pretty.
"That's mamma, Willie," Asenath said; "the mamma Aunt Anna said would come some time—Willie's mamma. Can't he kiss her?"
The child could not resist the face which, lifting itself up, looked eagerly at him, and he put up his little hands for Adah to take him, returning the kisses she showered upon him and clinging to her neck, while he said:
"Is you mam-ma sure? I prays for mam-ma—God take care of her, and pa-pa too. He's dead. They brought him back with a dum. Poor pa-pa, Willie don't want him dead;" and the little lip began to quiver.
Never before since she knew she was a widow had Adah felt so vivid a sensation of something akin to affection for the dead, as when her child and his mourned so plaintively for papa; and the tears which now fell like rain were not for Willie alone, but were given rather to the dead.
"Mrs. Richards has not yet greeted us," Asenath said; and turning to her at once, Adah apologized for her seeming neglect, pressing both her and Eudora's hands more cordially than she would have done a few moments before.
"Where is Anna?" she asked; and Mrs. Richards replied:
"She's sick. She regretted much that she could not come up here to-day;" while Willie, standing in Adah's lap, with his chubby arm around her neck, chimed in.