“Well, dear. Take care! Don’t give way, or you will go to pieces. There! What else?”
“And some cruel brute has taken away the tombstone. It was not there. Do you understand?” she cried, with fierce energy. “They stole it! It is gone!”
Anne understood well enough; but the fact, as told her, was so strange, so unlooked for, that she was amazed for a brief time beyond power of comment. The next moment all her heart went out to the mother at her side.
“It is horrible!” she cried. “Oh, for me, even, for me! And for you, what must it be?” She saw, as few would have done, the broken flower-fence, the rudely profaned and trampled grave, the gap in the earth where the stone had been. “For me, horrible—but, my dear God! what must it have been for you!”
“Yes; I am his mother!” She was moved because Anne did not pretend to share the maternal intensity of her feelings. “Only a mother could know. Archie says I must not think about it; but that is beyond my power—I must think about it. Who could have done it? I can’t see any reason in the theft. Do you think it could have been to annoy us, or to get a reward? I—”
“No,” said Anne. “Neither.”
“Then what could it have been? There must have been a motive.”
“Yes, there must have been.”
“And what? We are liked, I think, on the river. “We do try to help these people.”
“Yes.”