There was another pause, broken only by the rustle of leaves and the rushing of the river.
"Beulah was right," he said, at last. "Beulah is a wonderful girl, and a beautiful."
"She will not be wanting to go back home with us," said the mother.
"So much the better. Mary, Mary, we have no home to go back to!"
She looked at him with a sudden puzzled, half-frightened expression.
"No home, John? No home? You don't mean that?"
He nodded and turned his face away. "I said I hadn't told you all," he managed at length…"I sold the farm."
She was sitting on a fallen log, very trim, and grey, and small, but she seemed suddenly to become smaller and greyer still.
"Sold the old farm," she repeated, mechanically.
"Yes, I sold the old farm," he said again, as if finding some delight in goading himself with the repetition. "I thought I saw a chance to make a lot of money if only I had some ready cash to turn in my hand, and I sold it. I thought I would be rich and then I would be happy. But they took the money last night. They found out about it some way, and took it, and nearly killed our boy. Mary, you worked hard all your life, and to-day you have nothing. I brought you to this."
She looked with unseeing eyes through the trees at the fast-running water. Her thoughts were with the old home, with the ideals they had cherished when they founded it, with the hardships and the sorrow, and the sickness and the pain, and the joy that had hallowed it as no other spot in all the universe—the place where their first love had nursed them in its tenderness, where they had sat hand in hand in the gathering dusk, drinking the ripple of the water and the whirr of the wild duck's wing; where she had gone down into the valley of the shadow and their little children had come into their arms. And it was gone. He had sold it. Without so much as by-your-leave from the partner of his labours and his life he had sold it and left them destitute.