And there she sat hour after hour, till he died peacefully in her arms, and his last words were, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”
* * * * * *
When she had ceased to wish for them, friends came around her in her trouble, and ministered to her wants.
Kind faces followed Maurice to his last resting-place, and saved him from a pauper’s grave.
The widow and her children were clothed in decent mourning, and placed in comfortable lodgings.
Nea never roused from her silent apathy, never looked at them or thanked them.
Their kindness had come too late for her, she said to herself, and it was not until long afterward that she knew that she owed all this consideration to the family of their kind old friend Mr. Dobson, secretly aided by the purse of her cousin Beatrice Huntingdon, who dare not come in person to see her. But by and by they spoke very firmly and kindly to her. They pointed to her children—they had placed her boy at an excellent school—and told her that for their sakes she must live and work. If she brooded longer in that sullen despair she would die or go mad; and they brought her baby to her, and watched its feeble arms trying to clasp her neck; saw the widow’s passionate tears rain on its innocent face—the tears that saved the poor hot brain—and knew she was saved; and by and by, when they thought she had regained her strength, they asked her gently what she could do. Alas! she had suffered her fine talents to rust. They had nothing but impoverished material to use; but at last they found her a situation with two maiden ladies just setting up a school in the neighborhood, and here she gave daily lessons.
And so, as the years went on, things became a little brighter.
Nea found her work interesting, her little daughter Fern accompanied her to the school, and she taught her with her other pupils.
Presently the day’s labor became light to her, and she could look forward to the evening when her son, fetching her on his way from school, would escort her home—a humble home it was true; but when she looked at her boy’s handsome face, and Fern’s innocent beauty, and felt her little one’s caresses, as she climbed up into her lap, the widow owned that her lot had its compensations.