"He is happier up here, aren't you, Frankie boy?" returned Mr. Lucas, cheerfully.
"Oh, but he will tire you," I faltered.
"Tire me, this little bundle of bones!" peeping at Dot over his shoulder; "why, I could walk miles with him. Don't trouble yourself about him, Miss Esther. We understand each other perfectly."
And then he left me, walking with long, easy strides over the uneven ground, with Flurry running to keep up with him.
They used to go on the downs after tea, and sit on the little green beach, while Miss Ruth and I went to church.
Miss Ruth never would use her pony carriage on Sunday. A boy used to draw her in a wheel-chair. She never stayed at home unless she was compelled to do so. I never knew any one enjoy the service more, or enter more fully into it.
No matter how out of tune the singing might be, she always joined in it with a fervor that quite surprised me. "Depend upon it, Esther," she used to say, "it is not the quality of our singing that matters but how much our heart joins with the choir. Perfect praise and perfect music cannot be expected here; but I like to think old Betty's cracked voice, when she joins in the hymns, is as sweet to angels' ears as our younger notes."
The children always waited up for us on Sunday evening, and afterward Miss Ruth would sing with them; sometimes Mr. Lucas would walk up and down the gravel paths listening to them, but oftener I could catch the red light of his cigar from the cliff seat.
I wonder what sad thoughts came to him as the voices floated out to him, mixed up with the low ripple of waves on the sand.
"Where loyal hearts and true"—they were singing that, I remember; Flurry in her childish treble. And Flurry's mother, lying in her quiet grave—did the mother in paradise, I wonder, look down from her starry place on her little daughter singing her baby hymn, and on that lonely man, listening from the cliff seat in the darkness?