"I hate everything," he returned desperately; "but it wouldn't be square to leave him now when he's so cut up on my account."

We were both of us, I am sure, too moved to have much talk, and Tom did not stay long. He went off rather abruptly, with hardly a good-by; but I think I understood. I am glad he has the pluck to stand by poor old Deacon Daniel; but he must learn to be fond of baby. That will be a comfort to him.

June 15. George seems to me to be almost beside himself. I cannot comprehend what his wife is doing to him. She has apparently already come to realize that she is not succeeding in Tuskamuck, and is determined to conquer by display and showy ways of living. She cannot know us very well if she supposes that such means will do here.

Her latest move I find it hard to forgive her. I do not understand how George can have done it, no matter how much she urged him; but I am of course profoundly ignorant how such a woman controls a man. I am afraid one thing which made him attractive to me was that he was so willing to be influenced, but we see a man in a light entirely different when it is another woman who shapes his life. What once seemed a fine compliance takes on a strange appearance of weakness when we are no longer the moving force; but I think I do myself no more than justice when I feel that at least I tried always to influence George for his own good.

Poor Miss Charlotte came over directly after breakfast this morning to tell me. She had been brooding over it half the night, poor soul, and her eyes looked actually withered with crying and lack of sleep.

"I know I exaggerate it," she kept saying, "and of course he didn't mean to insult me; but to think anybody dared to ask me to sell the house, the Kendall house that our family has lived in for four generations! It would have killed my father if he had known I should live to come to this!"

I tried to soothe her, and to make her believe that in offering to buy her house George had thought only of how much he admired it, and not at all of her feelings, which he could not understand.

"Of course he could not understand my feelings," Miss Charlotte said, with a bitterness which I am sure was unconscious. "He never had a family, and I ought to remember that."

She grew somewhat more calm as she unburdened her heart. She told me George had praised the place, and said how much he had always liked it.

He confessed that it was his wife who first suggested the purchase: she wanted a house where she could entertain and which would be of more importance than the one in which she lived.

"He said," Miss Charlotte went on with a strange mingling of pride and sorrow, "his wife felt that the house in itself would give any family social standing. I don't know how pleased his wife would be if she knew he told me, but he said it. He told me she meant to have repairs and improvements. She must feel as if she owned it already. He said she had an iron dog stored somewhere that she meant to put on the lawn. Think of it, Ruth, an iron dog on our old lawn!"

Then suddenly all the sorrow of her lot seemed to overwhelm her at once, and she broke down completely. She sobbed so unrestrainedly and with so complete an abandonment of herself to her grief that I cried with her, even while I was trying to stop her tears.

"It isn't just George Weston's coming to ask me to sell the place," she said; "it is all of it: it's my being so poor I can't keep up the name, and the family's ending with me, and none of my kin even to bury me.

It's all of the hurts I've got from life, Ruth; and it's growing so old I've no strength any longer to bear them. Oh, it's having to keep on living when I want to be dead!"

I threw my arms about her, and kissed the tears from her wrinkled cheeks, though there were about as many on my own.

"Don't," I begged her, "don't, dear Miss Charlotte. You break my heart!

We are all of us your kin, and you know we love you dearly."

She returned my embrace convulsively, and tried to check her sobbing.

"I know it's cowardly," she got out brokenly. "It's cowardly and wicked.

I never broke down so before. I won't, Ruth dear. Just give me a little time."

Dear Miss Charlotte! I made her stay with me all day; and indeed she was in no condition to do anything else. I got her to take a nap in the afternoon, and when she went home she was once more her own brave self.

She said good-night with one of her clumsy joking speeches.

"Good-by, my dear," she said; "the next time I come I'll try not to be so much like the waterworks girl that had a creek in her back and a cataract in each eye."

She is always facetious when she does not quite trust herself to be serious. And I, who do not dare to trust myself to think about George and his wife, had better stop writing.

June 17. Deacon Richards presented himself at twilight, and found me sitting alone out on the doorsteps. I watched his tall figure coming up the driveway, bent with age a little, but still ma.s.sive and vigorous; and somehow by the time he was near enough to speak, I felt that I had caught his mood. He smiled broadly as he greeted me.

"Where's the baby?" he demanded. "I supposed I should find you giving it its supper."

"There isn't any 'it' in this house," was my retort; "and as for baby's supper, you are just as ignorant as a man always is. Any woman would know that babies are put to bed long before this."

He grinned down upon me from his height.

"How should I know what time it went to bed?" he asked, with a laugh in his voice. "I never raised a baby. I've come to talk about it, though."

"Look here, Deacon Daniel," I cried out, with affected indignation, "I will not have my baby called 'it,' as if she were a stick or a stock!"

He laughed outright at this; then at my invitation sat down beside me.

We were silent for a time, looking at the color fading in the west, and the single star swimming out of the purple as the sky changed into gray.

The frogs were working at their music with all the persistence of a child strumming five-finger exercises, but their noise only made the evening more peaceful.

"How restful it is," I said to him at last; "it almost makes one feel there can never be any fretting again about anything."

Deacon Daniel did not answer for a moment, then he said with the solemnity of one who seldom puts sentiment into words,--

"It is like the Twenty-third Psalm."

I simply a.s.sented, and then we were silent again, until at last he moved as if he were waking himself, and sighed. I always wonder whether somewhere in the past Deacon Richards has had his romance, and if so what it may have been. If he has, a night like this might well bring it up to his memory. I am glad if it comes to him with the peace of a psalm.

"Have you thought, Miss Ruth," the Deacon asked at length in the growing dark, "what a responsibility you are taking upon yourself in having that baby?"

It was like the dear old man to have considered me and to look at the moral side of the question. He wanted to help me, I could see; and of course he cannot understand how entirely religious one may be without theology. I told him I had thought of it very seriously; and it seemed to me sometimes that it was more than I was equal to. But I added that I could not help thinking I could do better by baby than Mrs. Webbe.

"Mrs. Webbe is no sort of a woman to bring up a child," he agreed. Then he added, with a shrewdness that surprised me a little: "Babies have got to be given baby-treatment as well as baby-food."

"Of course they have," was my reply. "Babies have a right to love as well as to milk, and poor little Thomasine would get very little from her grandmother."

Deacon Daniel gave a contemptuous snort.

"That woman couldn't really love anything," he declared; "or if she did she'd show it by being hateful."

I said she certainly loved Tom.

"Yes," he retorted; "and she's nagged him to death. For my part I can't more than half blame Tom Webbe as I ought to, when I think of his having had his mother to thorn him everlastingly."

"Then you do think it's better for baby to be with me than with her grandmother?" I asked him.

"It's a hundred times better, of course; but I wondered if you'd thought of the responsibility of its--of her religious instruction."

We had come to the true kernel of the Deacon's errand. I really believe that in his mind was more concern for me than for baby. He is always unhappy that I am not in the fold of the church; and I fancy that more or less consciously he was making of Thomasine an excuse for an attempt to reach me. It is not difficult to understand his feeling. Mother used to affirm that believers are anxious to proselyte because they cannot bear to have anybody refuse to acknowledge that they are right. This is not, I am sure, the whole of it. Of course no human being likes to be thought wrong, especially on a thing which, like religion, cannot be proved; but there is a good deal of genuine love in the attempt of a man like Deacon Daniel to convert an unbeliever. He is really grieved for me, and I would do anything short of actual dishonesty to make him suppose that I believed as he would have me. I should so like him to be happy about my eternal welfare. When the future does not in the least trouble me, it seems such a pity that he should be disturbed.

I told him to-night I should not give baby what he would call religious instruction, but I should never interfere if others should teach her, if they made what is good attractive.

"But you would tell her that religion isn't true," he objected.

"Oh, no;" I answered. "I should have to be honest, and tell her if she asked that I don't believe we know anything about another life; but of course as far as living in this one goes I shouldn't disagree with religion."

He tried to argue with me, but I entirely refused to be led on.