"Have your will," he said. "She must be saved. It is human nature for a mother to want her only son."
Joyfully the nurse prepared a telegram, and ran with it to the post-office, Daniel watching the while beside his wife. Not many hours later Mark stood by his mother, and that too by his father's wish, and from that moment Mrs. Walthew began to mend.
"I may have been wrong in keeping in one rut all my life, and keeping other people at a distance," said old Daniel. "Nurse Dora has taught me a good many lessons in a few weeks, more than I had learned in seventy years before. I don't know how we shall do without her, and she will have to leave us soon, she says. Here is Mark, far and away happier without money than mine has ever made me. That is a good thing. For I have said I will not leave him any, and I will not break my word."
"Do not make a will at all," said Nurse Dora.
"But I shall, my dear," said the old man, his eyes twinkling with a knowing expression, such as Mark had never seen in them before. "I shall make a will, that I may leave you a legacy. And there is no need to trouble for a way out of the difficulty. I never said I would not give Mark anything. I am free to do that, and I am not sure but what there is more pleasure in giving than leaving, for you can see the fruits of one, and not the other."
"Ah, Miss Dorothy," he continued, "the old man is not quite so blind as you thought! You have not come to speak to me of late years, but you have some of the child's face left yet, and you favour your mother. And my ears have caught old words now and then, and I know how good and true a heart my lad has won, and what a clever housewife and nurse can be joined to a born lady. You have won old Daniel as well as young Mark, and all I can say is, 'May God bless you both, and forgive me!'"
Is it worth while to add another word? To tell how Dolly Mitcheson's wise resolve, "to learn everything," brought good fruit, or to speak of the way in which Daniel opened his purse as well as his heart, or of the renewed health of Mrs. Walthew, the changed cottage, the abandoned rut, the perfect union between the faithful young pair when they twain became one, or of the manner in which Daniel kept his word?
He gave a handsome sum to Mark, and that, too, before his marriage; and when he and Barbara have done with the rest, it will go to "Nurse Dora," as old Daniel delights to call his daughter-in-law. No fear that this bequest will disturb the true union between Mark and his wife, despite the power put into her capable hands by the Married Women's Property Act!
Dorothy tells her husband in confidence, that however proud she may be of him, his devoted love and his great attainments, the conquest on which she plumes herself most of all is her victory over old Daniel's prejudices, and on having coaxed him out of the narrow path to which he had restricted himself for threescore years and ten.
THE END.