RUBY goes about her work and play very gravely for the next few days. A great sorrow sits at her heart which only time can lighten and chase away. She is very lonely, this little girl—lonely without even knowing it, but none the less to be pitied on that account. To her step-mother Ruby never even dreams of turning for comfort or advice in her small troubles and griefs. Dad is his little girl’s confidant; but, then, dad is often away, and in Mrs. Thorne’s presence Ruby never thinks of confiding in her father.
It is a hot sunny morning in the early months of the new year. Ruby is riding by her father’s side along the river’s bank, Black Prince doing his very best to accommodate his long steps to Smuttie’s slower amble. Far over the long flats of uncultivated bush-land hangs a soft blue haze, forerunner of a day of intense heat. But Ruby and dad are early astir this morning, and it is still cool and fresh with the beautiful young freshness of a glorious summer morning.
“It’s lovely just now,” Ruby says, with a little sigh of satisfaction. “I wish it would always stay early morning; don’t you, dad? It’s like where it says in the hymn about ‘the summer morn I’ve sighed for.’ P’raps that means that it will always be morning in heaven. I hope it will.”
“It will be a very fair summer morn anyway, little girl,” says dad, a sudden far-away look coming into his brown eyes.
At the child’s words, his thoughts have gone back with a sudden rush of memory to another summer’s morning, long, long ago, when he knelt by the bedside where his young wife lay gasping out her life, and watched Ruby’s mother go home to God. “I’ll be waiting for you, Will,” she had whispered only a little while before she went away. “It won’t be so very long, my darling; for even heaven won’t be quite heaven to me with you away.” And as the dawning rose over the purple hill-tops, and the birds’ soft twitter-twitter gave glad greeting to the new-born day, the angels had come for Ruby’s mother, and the dawning for her had been the glorious dawning of heaven.
Many a year has passed away since then, sorrowfully enough at first for the desolate husband, all unheeded by the child, who never missed her mother because she never knew her. Nowadays new hopes, new interests have come to Will Thorne, dimming with their fresher links the dear old days of long ago. He has not forgotten the love of his youth, never will; but time has softened the bitterness of his sorrow, and caused him to think but with a gentle regret of the woman whom God had called away in the suntime of her youth. But Ruby’s words have come to him this summer morning awakening old memories long slumbering, and his thoughts wander from the dear old days, up—up—up to God’s land on high, where, in the fair summer morning of Paradise, one is waiting longingly, hopefully—one who, even up in heaven, will be bitterly disappointed if those who in the old days she loved more than life itself will not one day join her there.
“Dad,” Ruby asks quickly, uplifting a troubled little face to that other dear one above her, “what is the matter? You looked so sorry, so very sorry, just now,” adds the little girl, with something almost like a sob.
“Sorry. Did I?” says the father, with a swift sudden smile. He bends down to the little figure riding by his side, and strokes the soft, brown hair. “I was thinking of your mother, Ruby,” dad says. “But instead of looking sorry I should have looked glad, that for her all tears are for ever past, and that nothing can ever harm her now. I was thinking of her at heaven’s gate, darling, watching, as she said she would, for you and for me.”
“I wonder,” says Ruby, with very thoughtful brown eyes, “how will I know her? And how will she know me, dad? God will have to tell her, won’t He? And p’raps I’ll be quite grown up ’fore I die, and mother won’t think it’s her own little Ruby at all. I wish I knew,” adds the child, in a puzzled voice.
“God will make it all right, dear. I have no fear of that,” says the father, quickly.