upied
with the button, 'but it was quite another sort of seriousness--a much
deeper and quieter sort of seriousness--that I spoke of John dear.'

As he bent his face to hers, she raised hers to meet it, and laid her
little right hand on his eyes, and kept it there.

'Do you remember, John, on the day we were married, Pa's speaking of the
ships that might be sailing towards us from the unknown seas?'

'Perfectly, my darling!'

'I think...among them...there is a ship upon the ocean...bringing...to
you and me...a little baby, John.'

Chapter 6

A CRY FOR HELP

The Paper Mill had stopped work for the night, and the paths and roads
in its neighbourhood were sprinkled with clusters of people going home
from their day's labour in it. There were men, women, and children in
the groups, and there was no want of lively colour to flutter in the
gentle evening wind. The mingling of various voices and the sound of
laughter made a cheerful impression upon the ear, analogous to that of
the fluttering colours upon the eye. Into the sheet of water reflecting
the flushed sky in the foreground of the living picture, a knot of
urchins were casting stones, and watching the expansion of the rippling
circles. So, in the rosy evening, one might watch the ever-widening
beauty of the landscape--beyond the newly-released workers wending
home--beyond the silver river--beyond the deep green fields of corn, so
prospering, that the loiterers in their narrow threads of pathway seemed
to float immersed breast-high--beyond the hedgerows and the clumps of
trees--beyond the windmills on the ridge--away to where the sky appeared
to meet the earth, as if there were no immensity of space between
mankind and Heaven.

It was a Saturday evening, and at such a time the village dogs, always
much more interested in the doings of humanity than in the affairs of
their own species, were particularly active. At the general shop, at
the butcher's and at the public-house, they evinced an inquiring spirit
never to be satiated. Their especial interest in the public-house would
seem to imply some latent rakishness in the canine character; for little
was eaten there, and they, having no taste for beer or tobacco (Mrs
Hubbard's dog is said to have smoked, but proof is wanting), could only
have been attracted by sympathy with loose convivial habits. Moreover,
a most wretched fiddle played within; a fiddle so unutterably vile, that
one lean long-bodied cur, with