Aunt Carter came in before we had been an hour at home. I think she watched the opportunity of Saul's absence to find me alone.
"See!" she exclaimed, holding up to my view a small eminence of stockings, "see what I have done, while you've just been going about the world doing nothing at all!" And with a really warm shake of my hand, Aunt Carter seated herself, for the second time, in Saul's chair.
"Why, I've been knitting too!" I said, in extenuation.
"What?" asked Aunt Carter. "Some new-fashioned thing or other, I'll warrant."
"No,—something that is as old as Eve."
"Who ever heard of Eve's knitting? The Bible doesn't say one word about it, Mrs. Monten. Besides, I don't think little Cain and Abel wore stockings at all."
"I did not say that Eve knit in Paradise. I only said I'd been knitting at something as old as Eve. I meant the thread of life. Here comes my husband to tell you how industrious I have been."
Saul led Aunt Carter on to talk of her youth, and gradually of his father, until he had learned all that she knew of his history. It was very little: only that a fur-trader and a party of Dacotahs came to the village, she had heard her father say, to sell their skins, bringing a brown little boy with them; that the child fell sick with scarlet fever, and they left him to the mercy of the village people, and never came back for him, although they had said they would.
Did Luella give her boy away?—Never, I was convinced, and Saul likewise.
Saul went back into his round of professional duties, and with much heart for a while.