"Hush! hush!" he said, with more love in his heart than had moved there for many months, and therefore more in his tone than she had heard for as many;--"if you cry you will be ill. Hush, my dear!" In a moment, ere he could prevent her, she had flung her arms around his neck as he stooped over her. "Husband! husband!" she cried, "is it my fault?" "You behaved perfectly," he returned. "No woman could have been braver." "Ah, but I wouldn't stay at home when you wanted me." "Never mind that now, my child," he said. At the word she pulled his face down to hers. "I have _you_, and I don't care," he added. "_Do_ you care to have me?" she said, with a sob that ended in a loud cry. "Oh! I don't deserve it. But I _will_ be good after this. I promise you I will." "Then you must begin now, my darling. You must lie perfectly still, and not cry a bit, or you will go after the baby, and I shall be left alone." She looked up at him with such a light in her face as he had never dreamed of there before. He had never seen her so lovely. Then she withdrew her arms, repressed her tears, smiled, and turned her face away. He put her hands under the clothes, and in a minute or two she was again fast asleep. CHAPTER VII. That day, when Phosy and her father had sat down to their Christmas dinner, he rose again, and taking her up as she sat, chair and all, set her down close to him, on the other side of the corner of the table. It was the first of a new covenant between them. The father's eyes having been suddenly opened to her character and preciousness, as well as to his own neglected duty in regard to her, it was as if a well of life had burst forth at his feet. And every day, as he looked in her face and talked to her, it was with more and more respect for what he found in her, with growing tenderness for her predilections, and reverence for the divine idea enclosed in her ignorance, for her childish wisdom, and her calm seeking--until at length he would have been horrified at the thought of training her up in _his_ way: had she not a way of her own to go--following--not the dead Jesus, but Him who liveth for evermore? In the endeavour to help her, he had to find his own position towards the truth; and the results were weighty.--Nor did the child's influence work forward merely. In his intercourse with her he was so often reminded of his first wife, and that, with the gloss or comment of a childish reproduction, that his memories of her at length grew a little tender, and through the child he began to understand the nature and worth of the mother. In her child she had given him what she could not be herself. Unable to keep up with him, she had handed him her baby, and dropped on the path.