‘And now we have got to the bottom of it at
last,’ cried her husband, rallying her, ‘and
this is the thing that made you serious?’
‘No dear,’ said Bella, twisting the button
and shaking her head, ’it wasn’t this.’
‘Why then, Lord bless this little wife of mine,
there’s a Fourthly!’ exclaimed John.
‘This worried me a little, and so did Secondly,’
said Bella, occupied with the button, ’but it
was quite another sort of seriousness—a
much deeper and quieter sort of seriousness—that
I spoke of John dear.’
As he bent his face to hers, she raised hers to meet
it, and laid her little right hand on his eyes, and
kept it there.
’Do you remember, John, on the day we were married,
Pa’s speaking of the ships that might be sailing
towards us from the unknown seas?’
‘Perfectly, my darling!’
’I think...among them...there is a ship upon
the ocean...bringing...to you and me...a little baby,
John.’
A CRY FOR HELP
The Paper Mill had stopped work for the night, and
the paths and roads in its neighbourhood were sprinkled
with clusters of people going home from their day’s
labour in it. There were men, women, and children
in the groups, and there was no want of lively colour
to flutter in the gentle evening wind. The mingling
of various voices and the sound of laughter made a
cheerful impression upon the ear, analogous to that
of the fluttering colours upon the eye. Into
the sheet of water reflecting the flushed sky in the
foreground of the living picture, a knot of urchins
were casting stones, and watching the expansion of
the rippling circles. So, in the rosy evening,
one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the landscape—beyond
the newly-released workers wending home—beyond
the silver river—beyond the deep green fields
of corn, so prospering, that the loiterers in their
narrow threads of pathway seemed to float immersed
breast-high—beyond the hedgerows and the
clumps of trees—beyond the windmills on
the ridge—away to where the sky appeared
to meet the earth, as if there were no immensity of
space between mankind and Heaven.
It was a Saturday evening, and at such a time the
village dogs, always much more interested in the doings
of humanity than in the affairs of their own species,
were particularly active. At the general shop,
at the butcher’s and at the public-house, they
evinced an inquiring spirit never to be satiated.
Their especial interest in the public-house would
seem to imply some latent rakishness in the canine
character; for little was eaten there, and they, having
no taste for beer or tobacco (Mrs Hubbard’s
dog is said to have smoked, but proof is wanting),
could only have been attracted by sympathy with loose
convivial habits. Moreover, a most wretched fiddle
played within; a fiddle so unutterably vile, that
one lean long-bodied cur, with a better ear than the
rest, found himself under compulsion at intervals
to go round the corner and howl. Yet, even he
returned to the public-house on each occasion with
the tenacity of a confirmed drunkard.
