"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. CHAPTER FIVE. WORKING AND WAITING.