“Well, Jack, has the time seemed very long to you?” Geoffrey asked, in a cheerful tone, as he sat down beside him.
“It has, sir; I’ve had hard work to wait. I’ve a strange hankerin’ after the old home to-night. If I could only wake up and find I’d been dreamin’ all these years, and the old place just as it was, with my girl waitin’ at the door for me, I’d almost be willin’ to give up my hope o’ heaven. But when I think it’s only an empty house—a cold hearth-stone, and—a grave somewhere nigh, that I’m goin’ to find, I feel a’most like givin’ up the battle.”
The man’s head sank upon his breast in a disconsolate way, while it seemed as if he had no heart to ask Geoffrey anything about the trip from which he had just returned.
The young man waited a few moments, hoping he would question him; but as he still remained absorbed in his own sad thoughts, he at length remarked:
“Well, Jack, I found Farmer Bruce.”
“Ay! then he’s alive yet; he must be nigh on to sixty,” the man replied, looking up now with a gleam of interest.
“I should judge him to be about that; but he’s hale and hearty, and seems like a very kind-hearted man, too.”
“A better never lived!” Jack affirmed; “many’s the good turn he and his wife has done me, and—ah!——”
A shiver completed the sentence, as if those by-gone days were too painful to dwell upon.
Geoffrey pitied the poor fellow from the depths of his heart, and yet he hardly knew where to begin, or how to break his good news to him.