Abel shook his head. “I shall know more when I get there, sir.”
Abel Carew locked up his cottage and began his pilgrimage into Hertfordshire with a staff and a wallet, intending to walk all the way. In a fortnight he was back again, bringing with him a long face.
“It is sad to see the child,” he said to me, as I sat in his room listening to the news. “She is no more like the bonnie Kettie that we knew here, than a dead girl’s like a living one. Worn out, bent and silent, she sits, day after day and week after week, and her mother cannot rouse her. She has sat so all along.”
“But what is the matter with her?”
“She is slowly dying, sir.”
“What of?”
“A broken heart.”
“Oh dear!” said I; believing I knew who had broken it.
“Yes,” said Abel, “he. He won her heart’s best love, Master Johnny, and she pines for him yet. Ketira says it was his marriage that struck her the death-blow. A few weeks she may still linger, but they won’t be many.”
Very sorry did I feel to hear it: for Ketira’s sake as well as Kettie’s. The remembrance of the day I had gilded the oak-ball, and her wonderful gratitude for it, came flashing back to me.