"Is any thing wrong?" Ruth asked hurriedly, as she rose up to give her charge into Rebecca's arms. "Is she worse?"
But Rebecca was crying. "Oh, ma'am," she said, "she just slipped away! it was awfully sudden for him! the doctor told him she might live for hours, I heard him."
"Rebecca, she is not dead!"
"She just stopped breathing, ma'am, and that was all. Mr. Burnham was sitting close to her where he has been sitting 'most all day, and she didn't look any different to me. I thought she was asleep; but he looked up suddenly at the doctor, poor man, with such a face! I never shall forget it! and the doctor said:—
"'Yes, she is gone.'"
And then Rebecca, who had not loved her mistress devotedly in life, broke into bitter weeping.
Ruth was like one paralyzed. She stood gazing at the girl as though unable to move. It was not Erskine's grief so much as her own consternation that held her. It seemed to her impossible that Irene was dead! With all her thinking, and her foreboding, she had not thought of that. She had felt on the eve of a great calamity, but it had not been death. Erskine's gray, pale face that morning had not suggested such trouble. Instead, she had worried herself all day long with the possibilities connected with that evening conference; of what Irene had told him, and how he had borne it and what he would feel must be done.
She went to Erskine at last, utterly in doubt what to say to him. He was in his private study with his head bowed on the desk. He did not notice his mother's entrance by so much as a movement. She went over to him and laid her hand gently on the brown curly locks, with a caressing movement familiar to him from childhood. He put out a hand and drew her to him, but neither of them spoke a word.
A tender memory of the long ago came to Ruth. She was back in the days of Erskine's childhood, she was in that very study which had been his father's, with her head bowed in anguish on her husband's desk, while he lay in the room below dressed for the grave. Her little boy stood beside her, a longing desire upon him to comfort his mother; and half frightened because she cried.
"Mamma," he had said at last, hesitatingly, "Mamma, does God sometimes make a mistake?" It had come to her like a voice of tender reproof from God himself, and had helped her as nothing else did. Long afterward she had told the boy about it, and it had become a sacred memory to them both.