“Well, that’s a fact!” sighed Nurse Lucy.  “If I hadn’t forgotten my butter in all this trouble!  And it must be made, sorrow or smiles, as the old saying is.  Come with me, Hilda dear, if you will.  Your face is the only bright thing I can see this sad day.”

[Illustration:  “EACH TOOK A SKIMMER AND SET EARNESTLY TO WORK.”]

So they went together into the cool dairy, where the light came in dimly through the screen of clematis that covered the window; Hilda bared her round white arms, and Nurse Lucy pinned back her calico sleeves from a pair that were still shapely, though brown, and each took a skimmer and set earnestly to work.  The process of skimming cream is in itself a soothing, not to say an absorbing one.  To push the thick, yellow ripples, piling themselves upon the skimmer, across the pan; to see it drop, like melted ivory, into the cream-bowl; to pursue floating cream islands round and round the pale and mimic sea,—­who can do this long, and not be comforted in some small degree, even in the midst of heavy sorrow?  Also there is joy and a never-failing sense of achievement when the butter first splashes in the churn.  So Nurse Lucy took heart, and churned and pressed and moulded her butter; and though some tears fell into it, it was none the worse for that.

But as she stamped each ball with the familiar stamp, showing an impossible cow with four lame legs—­“How many more times,” said the good woman, “shall I use this stamp; and what kind of butter will they make who come after me?” and her tears flowed again.  “Lawyer Clinch keeps a hired girl, and I never saw real good butter made by a hired girl.  They haven’t the feeling for it; and there’s feeling in butter-making as much as in anything else.”

But here Hilda interposed, and gently hinted that there ought now to be “feeling” about getting the farmer’s dinner.  “We must have the things he likes best,” she said; “for it will be hard enough to make him eat anything.  I will make that apple-pudding that he likes so much; and there is the fowl for the pie, you know, Nurse Lucy.”

The little maid was away on a vacation, so there was plenty of work to be done.  Dinner-time came and went; and it was not till she had seen Dame Hartley safe established on her bed (for tears and trouble had brought on a sick headache), and tucked her up under the red quilt, with a bottle of hot water at her and a bowl of cracked ice by her side,—­it was not till she had done this, and sung one or two of the soothing songs that the good woman loved, that Hilda had a moment to herself.  She ran out to say a parting word to the farmer, who was just starting for the village in the forlorn hope, which in his heart he knew to be vain, of getting an extension of time from Lawyer Clinch while search was being made for the wretched Simon.