Weakened by illness, by want of food, and by his late excess, Stephen well knew the chances were against his recovery; and ought not his wife to be made aware of his situation? The first glance at Mrs Morely’s pale face decided him. She must not know of this new misery that had befallen her husband, at least not now.

So it was no wonder that Stephen turned towards home with a sad face and a heavy heart, knowing all this. He had not been so downcast for a long time. It broke his heart to think of poor Morely. Even the misery and destitution that seemed to lie before the poor wife and children were nothing to this; and, as he dragged himself through the heavy snow, panting and breathless, he was praying, as even good men cannot always pray, with an urgency that would take no denial, that this poor soul might have space for repentance,—that he might not be suffered to go down into endless death. He did not use many words. “Save him, Lord, for Thy Name’s sake—for Thine own Name’s sake, Lord!” These were nearly all. But his hand was on the hem of the Lord’s garment. Hundreds of times the cry arose. Sometimes he spoke aloud in his agony, never knowing it, never seeing the wondering looks that followed him over the bridge and up the street to his own door.

“Well, Dolly!” he said, faintly, going in.

Dolly was never a woman of many words; she nodded her head towards the closed door and said, “A leetle quieter, if anything.”

“Thank God!” said Stephen, and the tears ran down his brown old face with a rush that he could not restrain. Dolly did not try to comfort him. She did better than that; she took from the stove a vessel containing soup, and having poured some into a basin and broken some bread into it, she set it before him, saying, “It’s no wonder you feel miserable. Eat this.”

“Can I, do you suppose?” said Stephen.

“You’ve got to!” said Dolly, taking such an attitude as a hen-sparrow might be supposed to assume should she see fit to threaten a barn-yard fowl. And he did eat it, every drop.

“I feel better,” he said, with a grateful sigh.

“I expect so,” said Dolly, briefly, as she removed the basin. It was Mrs Grattan’s acknowledged “object in life,” her recognised “mission,” to provide her husband with “something good to eat.” In the old days, when Stephen’s reformation was new, she had many a time satisfied herself with a crust, that he might have food to strengthen him to resist the old fierce craving for stimulants, and thus doing, she helped, more than she knew, God’s work of grace in him.

“Did you tell the poor creetur?” she asked.

Stephen shook his head, and told her of poor Mrs Morely’s illness, and of all that had been happening at the little log-house during the days of the storm. “It seemed as though it was more than she could bear to hear: so I told her what he said to me the other night, and nothing at all of to-day.”

They were both silent for a while, thinking. It was a great responsibility for them to take thus to conceal Morely’s situation from his wife, for it might be that he was in real danger. But it was not of this they were thinking. Even if he were not in danger—if, after a few days’ nursing, they were able to send him to Montreal as though nothing had happened—their troubles would not be at an end.

For they were very poor people. By the utmost economy they had been able, during the last five years, to buy and pay for the little house in which they lived; but they had nothing laid up for the future; and now that Littleton was growing to be a place of some importance, as the new railway was nearly completed to it, there were new shops of all kinds to be opened in it, and Stephen’s business would be interfered with; for he could not make good boots and shoes as cheaply as other people could buy and sell poor ones, and his custom was dropping off. It would all come right in the end, he told Dolly; but in the meantime a hard winter might lie before them.