“It will surely be in another month, Daddy—­perhaps next week—­perhaps to-morrow,” she would say cheerfully.  “And you did right not to put in any crops.  It would have been wicked to doubt.”

He quickly detected her insincerity, seeing that she did not at all believe.  As the summer came and went without a sign from the heavens, she became more positive and more constant in these assurances.  As the evening drew on, they would walk out along the unsown fields, now grown rankly to weeds, to where the valley fell away from their feet to the west.  There they could look over line after line of hills, each a little dimmer as it lay farther into the blue through which they saw it, from the bold rim of the nearest shaggy-sided hill to the farthest feathery profile all but lost in the haze.  Day after day they sat together here and waited for the sign,—­for the going down of the sun upon a night when there should be no darkness; when the light should stay until the sun came back over the eastern verge; when the trumpet should wind through the hills, and when the little man’s perplexities, if not his punishment, should be at an end.

And always when the dusk came she would try to cheer him to new hope for the next night, counting the months that remained in the year, the little time within which the great white day must be.  Then they would go back through the soft light of the afterglow, he with his bent shoulders and fallen face, shrunk and burned out, except for the eyes, and she in the first buoyant flush of her womanhood, free and strong and vital, a thing of warmth and colour and luring curve, restraining her quick young step to his, as she suppressed now a world of strange new fancies to his soberer way of thought.  When they reached home again, her words always were:  “Never mind, Daddy—­it must come soon—­there’s only a little time left in the year.”

It was on these occasions that he knew she was now the stronger, that he was leaning on her, had, in fact, long made her his support—­fearfully, lest she be snatched away.  And he knew at last that another change had come with her years; that she no longer confided in him unreservedly, as the little child had.  He knew there were things now she could not give him.  She communed with herself, and her silences had come between them.  She looked past him at unseen forms, and listened as if for echoes that she alone could hear, waiting and wanting, knowing not her wants—­yet driven to aloofness by them from the little bent man of sorrows, whose whole life she had now become.

His hope lasted hardly until the year ended.  Before the time was over, there had crept into his mind a conviction that the Son of Man would not come; that the Lord’s favour had been withdrawn from Israel.  He knew the cause,—­the shedding of innocent blood.  They might have made war; indeed, many of the revelations to Joseph discriminated even between murder and that murder in which innocent