ch better than the woman. He
thrummed upon the window-sill, then turned sharply away.

"There's a storm up, a cold one too."

"It stormed when--"

But Mrs. Ryck did not finish her sentence. Her husband, coming back to
his seat, tripped over a stool,--a little thing it was, fit only for a
child; a bit of dingy carpet covered it: once it had been bright.

"Martha, what _do_ you keep this about for? It's always in the way!"
setting it up angrily against the wall.

"I won't, if you'd rather not, Amos."

The farmer took up an almanac, and counted out the time when the
minister's salary and the butcher's bill were due; it gave occasion for
making no reply.

"Amos!" she said at last. He put down his book.

"Amos, do you remember what day it is?"

"I'm not likely to forget." His face darkened.

"Amos," again, more timidly, "do you suppose we shall ever find out?"

"How can I tell?"

"Ever know anything,--just a little?"

"We know enough, Martha."

"Amos! Amos!" her voice rising to a bitter cry, "we don't know enough!
God's the only one that knows enough. He knows whether she's alive, and
if she's dead he knows, and where she is; if there was ever any hope,
and if her mother--"

"Hope, Martha, for _her_!"

She had been looking into the fire, her attitude unchanged, her hands
wrung one into the other. She roused at that, something in her face as
if one flared a sudden light upon the dead.

"What ails you, Amos? You're her father; you loved her when she was a
little, innocent child."

When she was a child, and innocent,--yes. _That_ was long ago. He
stopped his walk across the room, and sat down, his face twitching
nervously. But he had nothing to say,--not one word to the patient woman
watching him there in the firelight, not one for love of the child who
had climbed upon his knee and kissed him in that very room, who had
played upon that little faded cricket, and wound her arms about the
mother's neck, sitting just so, as she sat now. Yet he _had_ loved her,
the pure baby. That stung him. He could not forget it, though he might
own no fathership to the wanderer.

Amos Ryck was a respectable man; he had the reputation of an honest,
pious farmer to maintain. Moreover, he was a deacon in the church. His
own life, stern in its purity, could brook no tenderness toward
offenders. His own child was as shut out from his forgiveness as he
deemed her to be from the forgiveness of his God. Yet you would have
seen,