‘There!’ said the woman, ’now you go.  They’ll cry together, and comfort together, better nor any one but a child can do.  I’ll stop with her as long as I’m needed, and if yo’ come to-morrow, yo’ can have a deal o’ wise talk with her, that she’s not up to to-day.’

As Margaret and her father went slowly up the street, she paused at Higgins’s closed door.

‘Shall we go in?’ asked her father.  ‘I was thinking of him too.’

They knocked.  There was no answer, so they tried the door.  It was bolted, but they thought they heard him moving within.

‘Nicholas!’ said Margaret.  There was no answer, and they might have gone away, believing the house to be empty, if there had not been some accidental fall, as of a book, within.

‘Nicholas!’ said Margaret again.  ’It is only us.  Won’t you let us come in?’

‘No,’ said he.  ’I spoke as plain as I could, ’bout using words, when I bolted th’ door.  Let me be, this day.’

Mr. Hale would have urged their desire, but Margaret placed her finger on his lips.

‘I don’t wonder at it,’ said she.  ’I myself long to be alone.  It seems the only thing to do one good after a day like this.’

CHAPTER XXXVII

LOOKING SOUTH

’A spade! a rake! a hoe! 
A pickaxe or a bill! 
A hook to reap, or a scythe to mow,
A flail, or what ye will—­
And here’s a ready hand
To ply the needful tool,
And skill’d enough, by lessons rough,
In Labour’s rugged school.’ 
Hood.

Higgins’s door was locked the next day, when they went to pay their call on the widow Boucher:  but they learnt this time from an officious neighbour, that he was really from home.  He had, however, been in to see Mrs. Boucher, before starting on his day’s business, whatever that was.  It was but an unsatisfactory visit to Mrs. Boucher; she considered herself as an ill-used woman by her poor husband’s suicide; and there was quite germ of truth enough in this idea to make it a very difficult one to refute.  Still, it was unsatisfactory to see how completely her thoughts were turned upon herself and her own position, and this selfishness extended even to her relations with her children, whom she considered as incumbrances, even in the very midst of her somewhat animal affection for them.  Margaret tried to make acquaintances with one or two of them, while her father strove to raise the widow’s thoughts into some higher channel than that of mere helpless querulousness.  She found that the children were truer and simpler mourners than the widow.  Daddy had been a kind daddy to them; each could tell, in their eager stammering way, of some tenderness shown some indulgence granted by the lost father.

’Is yon thing upstairs really him? it doesna look like him.  I’m feared on it, and I never was feared o’ daddy.’