Joe stepped to the window.

"Little Sim," he said, and dropped his head.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE DAWN OF LOVE.

Though she lost the best of her faculties, Mrs. Ray did not succumb to
the paralytic seizure occasioned by the twofold shock which she had
experienced. On the morning after Ralph's departure from Wythburn she
seemed to awake from the torpor in which she had lain throughout the
two preceding days. She opened her eyes and looked up into the faces
that were bent above her.

There were evidences of intelligence surviving the wreck of physical
strength. Speech had gone, but her eyes remained full of meaning. When
they spoke to her she seemed to hear. At some moments she, appeared to
struggle with the impulse to answer, but the momentary effort subsided
into an inarticulate gurgle, and then it was noticed that for an
instant the tears stood in her eyes.

"She wants to say, 'God bless you,'" said Rotha when she observed
these impotent manifestations, and at such times the girl would stoop
and put her lips to the forehead of the poor dear soul.

There grew to be a kind of commerce in kind between these two,
destitute as the one was of nearly every channel of communication. The
hundred tricks of dumb show, the glance, the lifted brow, the touch of
the hand, the smile, the kiss,--all these acquired their several
meanings, and somehow they seemed to speak to the silent sufferer in a
language as definite as words. It came to be realized that this was a
condition in which Mrs. Ray might live for years.

After a week, or less, they made a bed for her in a room adjoining the
kitchen, and once a day they put her in a great arm-chair and wheeled
her into her place by the neuk window.

"It will be more heartsome for her," said Rotha when she suggested the
change; "she'll like for us to talk to her all the same that she can't
answer us, poor soul."

So it came about that every morning the invalid spent an hour or two
in her familiar seat by the great ingle, the chair she had sat in day
after day in the bygone times, before these terrible disasters had
come like the breath of a plague-wind and bereft her of her powers.

"I wonder if she remembers what happened," said Willy; "do you think
she has missed them--father and Ralph?"

"Why, surely," said Rotha. "But her ears are better than her eyes.
Don't you mark how quick her breath comes sometimes when she has heard
your voice outside, and how bright her eyes are