“Mamma, I like this papa better than the other. You like him better, too.”
The mother’s wasted face reddened for a moment, then turned pale again, as she held out her hand to me. I looked at her anxiously, and discerned the welcome signs of recovery, clearly revealed. Her grand gray eyes rested on me again with a glimmer of their old light. The hand that had lain so cold in mine on the past night had life and warmth in it now.
“Should I have died before the morning if you had not come here?” she asked, softly. “Have you saved my life for the second time? I can well believe it.”
Before I was aware of her, she bent her head over my hand, and touched it tenderly with her lips. “I am not an ungrateful woman,” she murmured—“and yet I don’t know how to thank you.”
The child looked up quickly from her cake. “Why don’t you kiss him?” the quaint little creature asked, with a broad stare of astonishment.
Her head sunk on her breast. She sighed bitterly.
“No more of Me!” she said, suddenly recovering her composure, and suddenly forcing herself to look at me again. “Tell me what happy chance brought you here last night?”
“The same chance,” I answered, “which took me to Saint Anthony’s Well.”
She raised herself eagerly in the chair.
“You have seen me again—as you saw me in the summer-house by the waterfall!” she exclaimed. “Was it in Scotland once more?”