"I'll have a house for you there, by and by, Winnie," he said, as his arm drew round her.
"O I couldn't leave mother, you know," she answered.
Her mother called her at this instant, and she ran off, leaving him alone.
He had spoken to her all the while with no change on his wonted calm brow and lip; but when she left the room he left it; and wandering down to some hiding place on the rocky shore, where only the silent cedars stood witnesses, he wept there till his strong frame shook, with what he no more than the rocks would shew anywhere else. It never was shewn. He was just as he had been. Nobody guessed, unless his mother, the feeling that had wrought and was working within him; and she only from general knowledge of his nature. But the purpose of life had grown yet stronger and struck yet deeper roots instead of being shaken by this storm. The day of his setting off for Mannahatta was not once changed after it had been once fixed upon.
And it came. Almost at the end of November; a true child of the month; it was dark, chill, gloomy. The wind bore little foretokens of rain in every puff that made its way up the river, slowly, as if the sea had charged it too heavily, or as if it came through the fringe of the low grey cloud which hung upon the tops of the mountains. But nobody spoke of Winthrop's staying his journey. Perhaps everybody thought, that the day before, and the night before, and so much of the morning, it were better not to go over again.
"Hi!" sighed old Karen, as she took the coffee-pot off the hearth and wiped the ashes from it, — "it's a heavy place for our feet, just this here; — I wonder why the Lord sends 'em. He knows."
"Why he sends what, Karen?" said Winifred, taking the coffee- pot from her, and waiting to hear the answer.
"Oh go 'long, dear," said the old woman; — "I was quarrelling with the Lord's doings, that's all."
"He knows!" repeated Winnie, turning away and bending her face down till hot tears fell on the cover of the coffee-pot. She stopped at the door of the keeping-room and fought the tears with her little hand desperately, for they were too ready to come; once and again the hand was passed hard over cheeks and eyes, before it would do and she could open the door.
"Well, mother," said Mr. Landholm, coming back from a look at the weather, — "let's see what comfort can be got out of breakfast!"