“George,” says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, “if I thought you cross enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier’s wife—­who could have bitten her tongue off afterwards and ought to have done it almost—­said this morning, I don’t know what I shouldn’t say to you now.”

“My kind soul of a darling,” returns the trooper.  “Not a morsel of it.”

“Because really and truly, George, what I said and meant to say was that I trusted Lignum to you and was sure you’d bring him through it.  And you have brought him through it, noble!”

“Thankee, my dear!” says George.  “I am glad of your good opinion.”

In giving Mrs. Bagnet’s hand, with her work in it, a friendly shake—­for she took her seat beside him—­the trooper’s attention is attracted to her face.  After looking at it for a little while as she plies her needle, he looks to young Woolwich, sitting on his stool in the corner, and beckons that fifer to him.

“See there, my boy,” says George, very gently smoothing the mother’s hair with his hand, “there’s a good loving forehead for you!  All bright with love of you, my boy.  A little touched by the sun and the weather through following your father about and taking care of you, but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe apple on a tree.”

Mr. Bagnet’s face expresses, so far as in its wooden material lies, the highest approbation and acquiescence.

“The time will come, my boy,” pursues the trooper, “when this hair of your mother’s will be grey, and this forehead all crossed and re-crossed with wrinkles, and a fine old lady she’ll be then.  Take care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, ’I never whitened a hair of her dear head—­I never marked a sorrowful line in her face!’ For of all the many things that you can think of when you are a man, you had better have that by you, Woolwich!”

Mr. George concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy beside his mother in it, and saying, with something of a hurry about him, that he’ll smoke his pipe in the street a bit.

CHAPTER XXXV

Esther’s Narrative

I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life became like an old remembrance.  But this was not the effect of time so much as of the change in all my habits made by the helplessness and inaction of a sick-room.  Before I had been confined to it many days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had been really divided by years.  In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.

My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety to think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the oldest of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when I went home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my childish shadow at my side, to my godmother’s house.  I had never known before how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could put it.