“And you were starving when you left here?”
“Oh, I got some bread!”
I suppose every man, woman and child remembers that terrible night three years ago when we had lightning while the snow was on the ground. The flashes plowed great yellow seams through the gray of the day, and at night a freezing storm of sleet and rain came.
It was a terrible night. I staggered home through it to where a big fire, and blue eyes and black, and slippers, and roasting apples were awaiting me. I thought of Bob—my old night-owl, with a heart in him, and wondered whether he was keeping his silent, but uncomplaining vigil about the little hut on the hillside. I even went so far as to speculate on this point with a certain blue-eyed youngster on my knee, to whom Bob’s life was a romance and a wonder.
Bless me! and all the time I was pitying him, I didn’t know that he had “gone home” and was all right.
His wife slept uneasily that night, as she has since said. She rolled in her sleep a long time, and at last got up and went to the window and looked out. She shuddered at the sound of the whizzing sleet and pitiless hum of the rain on the roof. Then she stumbled sleepily back to her couch, and dreamed of a long shady lane, and a golden-green afternoon in May, and a bright-faced young fellow that looked into her heart, and held her face in his soft fingers. How this dream became tangled in her thoughts that night of all nights, she never could tell. But there it was gleaming like a thread of gold through the dismal warp and woof of her life.
It was full day when she awoke. As she turned lazily upon her side she started up in affright. There was a man, dripping wet, silent, kneeling by her bedside. An old felt hat lay upon the floor. The man’s head was bowed deep down over the bed and his hands were bundled tenderly about one of the baby’s fists that had been thrown above its head.
The worn, weatherbeaten figure was familiar to her. But there was something that stopped her, as she started forward angrily. She stood posed like a statue for a moment, then bent down, curiously and tenderly, and with trembling fingers pulled the cover back from the bed, and looked up into the man’s face steadily. Then she put her fingers on his hand furtively and shrinkingly. And then a strange look crept into her face—the dream of the night came to her like a flash—and she sank back upon the floor, and dropped her head between her knees.
Ah, yes, Bob had “come home.”