“I will work for us both. He belongs to me as much as I do to him. If he had only kept nothing from me, nothing of this would have happened.—Do come, Corney, while I am able to walk, I feel as if I were going to die.”

“And this is the woman I was such a savage to last night!” said Mr. Raymount to himself.

“Forgive me, Amy!” he cried, stretching out his arms to her. “I have behaved like a brute. To strike my son’s wife! I deserve to be hanged for it. I shall never forgive myself. But you must forgive me, for God’s sake!”

Even before he had finished, she was in his arms clinging to him.

The strong man was now the weaker. The father, not the daughter, wept. After a moment she drew back her head.

“Come, Corney,” she said, “out of your bed and down on your knees to your own blessed father, and confess your sins to him. Tell him you’re sorry for them, and you’ll never do them again.”

Corney obeyed. In some strange, lovely way she had got the mistressship of his conscience as well as his heart. He got out of bed at once, went straight down on his knees, and, though he did not speak, was presently weeping like a child. It was a strange group in the gray of the new morning—ah, indeed, a new morning for them!—the girl in the arms of the elderly man, and the youth kneeling at their feet, both men weeping and the girl radiant.

Gerald Raymount closed the door on his son and his son’s wife and hastened to his own to tell her all.

Immediately when the emotional strain was off her, Amy fell into a severe and fevered illness, brought on by her exposure to the cold and rain and pain. She was brought almost to death’s door. Corney in his turn became nurse, and improved not a little from his own anxiety, her sweetness, and the sympathy of every one, his father included.

But such was Amy’s constitution that when she began to recover she recovered rapidly, and was soon ready for the share lovingly allotted her in the duties of the house.

47. The Message

—Forty-Seven —

The Message

But the precious little Mark did not get better, and it soon became very clear to the major that, although months might elapse before he left them, he must go before long. It was the only cloud that now hung over the family. But the parting drew upon them so softly, with so little increase of suffering, and with such a mild but genuine enjoyment of existence that only he was thoroughly aware that death was at the door. The rest said the summer would certainly restore him. But the major expected him to die with the first of the warm weather. The child himself believed he was going soon.