I heard a noise behind me, and the next moment I found myself put aside like a child, and Robert Fraser stood face to face with her that had been Jessie Loudon.
"Come in," he said. And when she drew back from him with a kind of shudder, and felt uncertainly for her shawl, he stepped aside and motioned her to enter with a certain large and commanding gesture I had never seen him use before. And as if accustomed to obey, the woman came slowly within the lighted room. Even then, however, she would not sit down, but stood facing us both, a girl prematurely old, her lips nearly as pale as her worn cheeks, her blown hair disordered and wispy about her forehead, and only the dark and tragic flashing of her splendid eyes telling of a bygone beauty.
The Stickit Minister stood up also, and as he leaned his hand upon the table, I noticed that he gently shut the Bible which I had left open, that the woman's eye might not fall upon the faded envelope which marked the thirty-eighth of Job.
"Do I understand you to say," he began, in a voice clear, resonant, and full, not at all the voice of a stricken man, "that my brother has not yet visited your children?"
"He had not come when I ran out—they are much worse—dying, I think!" she answered, also in another voice and another mode of speech—yet a little stiffly, as if the more correct method had grown unfamiliar by disuse.
For almost the only time in his life I saw a look, stern and hard, come over the countenance of the Stickit Minister.
"Go home, Jessie," he said; "I will see that he is there as fast as horses can bring him!"
She hesitated a moment.
"Is he not here?" she faltered. "Oh, tell me if he is—I meant to fetch him back. I dare not go back without him!"
The Stickit Minister went to the door with firm step, the woman following without question or argument.