When she reached the foot of the stairs, she knew that she was right, and she stood and looked, with her heart sinking down, down, wondering with a great dread what could have happened.  Her grandfather was sitting in his usual seat at the end of the table, holding a letter in his hand, while her grandmother stood beside him, her hand leaning heavily on his shoulder; and both their faces looked white and drawn, and full of trouble.  Tears sprang to Jessie’s eyes at sight of them.  Neither was speaking, but every now and then there burst from the old man that strange sound that Jessie had heard, and it was like the cry of a hurt animal.

When she heard it again, and knew whence it came, Jessie flew to him in terror.  “Oh, granp, what is it?” she cried.  “Who has hurt him?” she cried, turning to her grandmother almost fiercely.  “Who has done anything to granp—­and you?” she added, when she caught sight of her grandmother’s face.

Patience Dawson’s hand slipped from her husband’s shoulder down to Jessie’s, and crept caressingly round the little girl’s neck, while the old man threw his arm around her to draw her nearer to him.

“’Tis your mother, child,” cried Patience, her words seeming to tumble from her anyhow.  “She’s dead!  Our only child, and took from us for ever, and never knowing how much we loved and forgave her, and how we’ve hungered night and day for a sight of her—­and now I shall never, never see her again!” and then poor Patience broke down, and kneeling beside her husband and grandchild, bowed her head on the table and wept uncontrollably.

At the sight of their trouble Jessie’s own tears fell fast.  “Mother,” she cried, scarcely grasping the real state of the case, and all it meant to her.  “Mother! dead?  Granp, mother isn’t really dead, is she?  Won’t I—­won’t I never see her any more,” the truth gradually forcing itself on her mind—­“won’t she ever come and live here with us, and see my rose—­and—­and all the things I’ve been saving for her?” Her little face was white now, and her lips quivering with the pain of realization.

Her grandfather shook his head.  “She won’t ever come to us; never, never no more,” he sighed heavily.  “But maybe,” he added a moment later, speaking slowly and with difficulty, “maybe she sees and knows now, better than she has all these years—­and is happier.”

“Why didn’t she write, why didn’t she tell us where she was?” wailed Patience despairingly.  “I would have wrote at once and told her how we’d forgiven everything.”

“Poor maid,” said Thomas Dawson softly, “I reckon she had her reasons; her letter tells us that, without putting it into so many words.  Read it again, mother, read it to the child—­I can’t.”

Patience took up the letter, but it was some time before she could control herself sufficiently to begin.

     “My dearest Father and Mother,