“Some people here say, Lee, that you should have sent Mamie and her young one to the workhouse, and not have charged yourself with them.”
“True, sir, several have told me that. But people don’t know what a father’s feelings are till they experience them. Mary was my own child that I had dandled on my knee, and watched grow up in her pretty ways, and I was fonder of her than of any earthly thing. The workhouse might not have taken her in.”
“She has forfeited all claim on you. And come home only to break your heart.”
“True,” meekly assented Lee. “But the Lord has told us we are to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven. If I had turned her adrift from my door and heart, sir, who knows but I might have been turned adrift myself at the Last Day.”
Evidently it was of no use talking to one so unreasonable as Lee. And Mr. Ben Rymer went back to his shop. A customer was entering it with a prescription and a medicine-bottle.
One morning close upon Christmas, Mrs. Todhetley despatched me to Timberdale through the snow for a box of those delectable “Household Pills,” which have been mentioned before: an invention of the late Mr. Rymer’s, and continued to be made up by Ben. Ben was behind the counter as usual when I entered, and shook the snow off my boots on the door-mat.
“Anything else?” he asked me presently, wrapping up the box.
“Not to-day. There goes old Lee! How thin he looks!”
“Starvation,” said Ben, craning his long neck to look between the coloured globes at Lee on the other side the way. “Lee has nothing coming in now.”