“Ah, that begins to sound like home again. Yes, I am hungry. I am always hungry when I can come home to my own table and have my good wife’s cooking.�
And Alice, intent upon the hospitable entertainment of her husband, forgot, for the time, the spectres that haunted her.
CHAPTER XXI
THE REAPER
The spring brought trouble deep and lasting to the home of Nathan. Their child, upon whom Lissa had rested her heart and hopes after the manner of all mothers since the dawn of creation, sickened and died.
One day its little, warm lips had been pressed to hers, while its eyes looked inquiringly into her face with the mysterious intensity of infancy. The next, the waxen body lay cold and still before her unknowing and unheeding, and the weighted agony of her heart was beyond expression.
Oh, mothers who have had this experience, how I pity you! How my heart bleeds for you! It is to tear out a vital part of your being, to rend the very cords of life, to see that precious little casket of clay, so pure, so fair, borne away. How can you bear it?
Lissa did not bear her trial bravely, but sank beneath it. For days she neither ate nor slept. She would sit in the spot where her baby died, and beg that it should return to her. She would pray that it might become materialized and appear to her as the children she had at one time seen come from a cabinet at a seance. That seemed to be her one thought, to see it, to feel its little warm hands once more.
Nathan watched her with increasing anxiety, scarce naming, even to himself, what he feared. At last one morning she startled him by declaring that the child had come to her in the night. That she had seen it and touched its hands.
“It was but a dream, dearest. Little Lucy is safe in Jesus’ arms. Think of that, Lissa, safe!�
She turned from him impatiently.