“Old Davis will never need another house now, Ruby,” Dad answers, looking down into the eager little upturned face. “He has gone away. God has taken him away, dear.”
“He’s dead?” Ruby questions with wide-open, horror-stricken eyes.
The little girl hardly hears her father as he goes on to tell her how the old man’s end came, suddenly and without warning, crushing him in the ruins of his burning cottage, where the desolate creature died as he had lived, uncared for and alone. Into Ruby’s heart a great, sorrowful regret has come, regret for a kind act left for ever undone, a kind word for ever unspoken.
“And I can never do it now!” the child sobs. “He’ll never even know I wanted to be kind to him!”
“Kind to whom, little girl?” her father asks wonderingly.
And it is in those kind arms that Ruby sobs out her story. “I can never do it now!” that is the burden of her sorrow.
The late Australian twilight gathers round them, and the stars twinkle out one by one. But, far away in the heaven which is beyond the stars and the dim twilight of this world, I think that God knows how one little girl, whose eyes are now dim with tears, tried to be “kind,” and it may be that in His own good time—and God’s time is always the best—He will let old Davis “know” also.
