ily, "you look tired."

"Tired? No, I was only thinking, Amos."

The pallor of her face, its timid eyes and patient mouth, the whole
crushed look of the woman, struck him freshly. He stooped and kissed her
forehead, the sharp lines of his face relaxing a little.

"I didn't mean to be hard on you, Martha; we both have enough to bear
without that, but it's best not to talk of what can't be helped,--you
see."

"Yes."

"Don't think anything more about the day; it's not--it's not really good
for you; you must cheer up, little woman."

"Yes, Amos."

Perhaps his unusual tenderness gave her courage; she stood up, putting
both arms around his neck.

"If you'd only try to love her a little, after all, my husband! He would
know it; He might save her for it."

Amos Ryck choked, coughed, and said it was time for prayers. He took
down the old Bible in which his child's baby-fingers used to trace their
first lessons after his own, and read, not of her who loved much and was
forgiven, but one of the imprecatory Psalms.

When Mrs. Ryck was sure that her husband was asleep that night, she rose
softly from her bed, unlocked, with noiseless key, one of her bureau
drawers, took something from it, and then felt her way down the dark
stairs into the kitchen.

She drew a chair up to the fire, wrapped her shawl closely about her,
and untied, with trembling fingers, the knots of a soft silken
handkerchief in which her treasures were folded.

Some baby dresses of purest white; a child's little pink apron; a pair
of tiny shoes, worn through by pattering feet; and a toy or two all
broken, as some impatient little fingers had left them; she was such a
careless baby! Yet they never could scold her, she always affected such
pretty surprises, and wide blue-eyed penitence: a bit of a queen she was
at the farm.

Was it not most kindly ordered by the Infinite Tenderness which pitieth
its sorrowing ones, that into her still hours her child should come so
often only as a child, speaking pure things only, touching her mother so
like a restful hand, and stealing into a prayer?

For where was ever grief like this one? Beside this sorrow, death was
but a joy. If she might have closed her child's baby-eyes, and seen the
lips which had not uttered their first "Mother!" stilled, and laid her
away under the daisies, she would have sat there alone that night, and
thanked Him who had given and taken away.

But _this_,--a wanderer upon the face of