“Five years.  Yes.  Well, dear?” anxiously.

Her eyes were shut, he stroked the lids softly, thinking how moist and red her lips were:  never as beautiful a face as the little mother’s; for so Jem, feeling quite grown up in his heart, called her there.

“Well, then, no more trouble, but somebody to take care of us all the time.  Whenever I see a preacher, now, I think of father”—­stopping abruptly, with that anxious, incisive look so sad to see on a child’s face.

She did not reply at first; then,—­

“He preached God’s word as he knew it,” she said, dryly.

“And whenever I hear of a good, brave man, I think, ’That’s like father!’”

Her eyes opened now.

“That’s true, Jemmy!  God knows that’s true!  So proud my boy will be of his father!”

She did not say anything more, but began playing with his hair, her month unsteady, and a bashful, dreamy smile in her eyes.  She looked very young and girlish in the mellow light.

“He’s not coarse like me, Jem,” she said at last.  “Even more like a woman in some ways.  He always came nearer to you children, for instance; I mind how you always used to creep away from me close to him at night.  He hates noise, Stephen does,—­and mean, scraping ways, such as we’re used to, being poor.  My boy’ll mind that?  We’ll keep anything shabby out of his sight, when he comes back.”

“I’ll mind,” said Jem, dryly.  “But—­Well, no matter.  We’re to try and be like him, Tom and I?  I understand.”

She drew down her head suddenly into the pillow.  Jem had been growing sleepy, but he started wide awake now, trying to see her face:  the pretty pink color his questions had brought was gone from it.

“Did you speak, mother?”

No answer.

“I said we are to be men like him, Tom and I, if we can?”

He knew he had touched her to the quick somehow:  his heart beat thick with the old childish terror, as he waited for her answer.

“Yes, you are to try, my son.”

Martha Yarrow’s frivolous chirruping voice was altered, with meaning in it he never had heard before, as if her answer came out of some depth where God had faced her soul, and forced it to speak truth.  But when, after that, the boy, curious to know more, went on with his questions, she quieted him gravely, kissed him good-night, and turned over,—­to sleep, he concluded, from her regular breathing.  However, when Jem, after a while, began to snore, she got up and went to the kitchen-fire, kneeling down on the stone hearth:  her head was on fire, and her body cold.

“So they shall be like him!” she whispered, with a fierce, baited look, as if by her wife’s trust in him she defied the whole world.  “I have kept my word.  I’ve tried to make his sons what God made him in the beginning.”