“These things, these unconsidered trifles of hearts and hopes and sorrows, they’re quite beneath notice, are they not, father? You know no more of the woman that drove poor David to the top of his tower—the David I remember was not a recluse—than you did of the dashing, handsome youth to whom you handed over your only child ... that she might live happy ever after!” The widow laughed. But it was with a twist of her ripe, red mouth and a harsh sound like the note of an indignant bird. The old man, remained arrested for a space, stooping over the stove with the bellows poised in his hand, as if the meaning of her words were slowly filtering to his brain. Then, letting his implement fall with a little clatter, he shuffled back towards his daughter and stood again gazing at her, his lips moving noiselessly, his eye dim and troubled. Master Simon’s mind, trained to such alertness in dealing with a certain set of ideas, groped like that of a child in the endeavour to lay hold of the new living problem. At length he put out a trembling finger and timidly laid it for a second on her hand. She looked up at him with an altered expression, infinitely soft and womanly. “I am afraid,” said he quickly, as if ashamed of the breakdown of his own philosophy, “I am afraid you have suffered, my girl.” “I never complained while it lasted,” she answered. “I shall not complain now that it is over.” He gathered the skirts of his gown more closely about him and regarded her from under his shaggy eyebrows with an expression of deadly earnestness in singular contrast with his appearance. “You spent long nights in tears, child, longing for the sound of his step?” “How do you know?” she answered, flashing at him. “Your mother did,” he sighed. There fell a heavy pause, during which Belphegor sang with the simmering phials a quaint duet as fine as a gossamer thread. “Until the morning dawned, when I dreaded the sound of that step,” said the widow at last. Master Simon frowned more deeply. New wrinkles gathered on his countenance. “A worthless fellow! A wastrel, a gambler, a reprobate! And you doing your wife’s part of screening and mending, nursing and paying. Aye, aye, I know it all. It was your mother’s fate.” “And did my mother get cursed for her pains, and struck?” The old man started as if the word had indeed been a blow. “Ah, no,” he cried sharply. “Ah, no, not that, never that!” Ellinor came close and laid her hands on his shoulders. “Bad enough, God knows,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Heedless and selfish—but that, never!” She looked at him, long and tenderly. When she spoke her tones and words were as full of deliberate comfort as her touch.