to bear?
What if he were black? what if he were born a thief? what if all the
sullen revenge of his nature had made him an outcast from the poorest
poor? Was there no latent good in this soul for which Christ died, that a
kind hand might not have brought to life? None? Something, I think,
struggled up in the touch of his hand, catching the skirt of his child's
dress, when it came near him, with the timid tenderness of a mother
touching her dead baby's hair,--as something holy, far off, yet very near:
something in his old crime-marked face,--a look like this dog's, putting
his head on my knee,--a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the slow
memory of a wrong done to his soul in a day long past. A wrong to both,
you say, perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and never to be recompensed.
Never?

"Yoh must go, my little girl," he said at last.

Whatever he did must be done quickly. She came up, combing the thin gray
hairs through her fingers.

"Father, I dunnot understan' what it is, rightly. But stay with me,--stay,
father!"

"Yoh've a many frien's, Lo," he said, with a keen flash of jealousy.
"Ther's none like yoh,--none."

She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand, where he
could see them. If it had ever hurt her to be as she was, if she had ever
compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women, she was glad now and
thankful for every fault and deformity that brought her nearer to him, and
made her dearer.

"They're kind, but ther's not many loves me with true love, like yoh.
Stay, father! Bear it out, whatever it be. Th' good time'll come, father."

He kissed her, saying nothing, and went with her down the street. When he
left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near the mill. God knows
what vague dread was in her brain; but she came back to watch and help.

Old Yare wandered through the great loom-rooms of the mill with but one
fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,--that above him the man
lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than death on him to-morrow. Up
and down, aimlessly, with his stoker's torch in his hand, going over the
years gone and the years to come, with the dead hatred through all of the
pitiless man above him,--with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought
of things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,--of the
corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in "th' Alabam',"--of the
scow his young master gave him once, the first thing he really ow