The farmer took up an almanac, and counted out the time when the minister’s salary and the butcher’s bill were due; it gave occasion for making no reply.

“Amos!” she said at last.  He put down his book.

“Amos, do you remember what day it is?”

“I’m not likely to forget.”  His face darkened.

“Amos,” again, more timidly, “do you suppose we shall ever find out?”

“How can I tell?”

“Ever know anything,—­just a little?”

“We know enough, Martha.”

“Amos!  Amos!” her voice rising to a bitter cry, “we don’t know enough!  God’s the only one that knows enough.  He knows whether she’s alive, and if she’s dead he knows, and where she is; if there was ever any hope, and if her mother—­”

“Hope, Martha, for her!”

She had been looking into the fire, her attitude unchanged, her hands wrung one into the other.  She roused at that, something in her face as if one flared a sudden light upon the dead.

“What ails you, Amos?  You’re her father; you loved her when she was a little, innocent child.”

When she was a child, and innocent,—­yes. That was long ago.  He stopped his walk across the room, and sat down, his face twitching nervously.  But he had nothing to say,—­not one word to the patient woman watching him there in the firelight, not one for love of the child who had climbed upon his knee and kissed him in that very room, who had played upon that little faded cricket, and wound her arms about the mother’s neck, sitting just so, as she sat now.  Yet he had loved her, the pure baby.  That stung him.  He could not forget it, though he might own no fathership to the wanderer.

Amos Ryck was a respectable man; he had the reputation of an honest, pious farmer to maintain.  Moreover, he was a deacon in the church.  His own life, stern in its purity, could brook no tenderness toward offenders.  His own child was as shut out from his forgiveness as he deemed her to be from the forgiveness of his God.  Yet you would have seen, in one look at the man, that this blow with which he was smitten had cleft his heart to its core.

This was her birthday,—­hers whose name had not passed his lips for years.  Do you think he had once forgotten it since its morning?  Did not the memories it brought crowd into every moment?  Did they not fill the very prayers in which he besought a sin-hating God to avenge him of all his enemies?

So many times the child had sat there at his feet on this day, playing with some birthday toy,—­he always managed to find her something, a doll or a picture-book; she used to come up to thank him, pushing back her curls, her little red lips put up for a kiss.  He was very proud of her,—­he and the mother.  She was all they had,—­the only one.  He used to call her “God’s dear blessing,” softly, while his eyes grew dim; she hardly heard him for his breaking voice.