"I wish, lad—Would thee say, 'God bless thee, Jane'? It's long since as I've heard that, an' there's no one but thee t' 'll say it."
The boy was touched.
"Often I thinks it, Jane,—often. Ye've been good to me these six years. I was nothin' but a beggar's brat when ye took me in. I mind that, though ye think I forget, when I'm newly rigged out sometimes. God bless ye! yes, I'll say it: God knows I will."
She went out into the little passage. He heard her hesitate there a minute. It was a double house: the kitchen and sitting-room at one side of the narrow hall; at the other, Jane's chamber, and a room which she usually kept locked. He had heard her there at night sometimes, for he slept above it, and once or twice had seen the door open in the daytime, and looked in. It held, he saw, better furniture than the rest of the house: a homespun carpet of soft, grave colors, thick drab curtains, a bedstead, one or two bookcases, filled and locked, of which Jane made as little use, he was sure, as she could of the fowling-piece and patent fishing-rod which he saw in one corner. There were no shams, no cheap makeshifts in the Quaker's little house, in any part of it; but this room was the essence of cleanness and comfort, Andy thought. He never asked questions, however: some ingredient in his poor hodge-podge of a brain keeping him always true to this hard test of good breeding. So to-night, though he heard her until near eleven o'clock moving restlessly about in this room, he hesitated until then, before he went to speak to her.
"She's surely sick," he said, with a worried look, lighting his candle. "Women are the Devil for nerves."
Coming to the open door, however, he found her only busy in rubbing the furniture with a bit of chamois-skin. She looked up at him, her face very red, and the look in her face that children have when going out for a holiday.
"How does thee think it looks, Andy?" her voice strangely low and rapid.
He looked at her curiously.
"I'm makin' it ready, thee knows. Pull to this shutter for me, lad. A good many years I've been makin' it ready"—
"You shiver so, ye'd better go to bed, Jane."