Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/77

Rh wouldn't interfere with her ploughing if we were both to die at once."

"No," said Rob deliberately, "that's just what it would not." And he threw himself back on the straw and clasped his hands under his head, gazing up into the dark roof above him with very reflective eyes.

The truth was that, his elderly ways and practical methods notwithstanding, he was an affectionate little fellow at heart, and Meg was very like him in this as in all other ways. Their father's house had been home, narrow as its resources were and few as had been the privileges costing money they could enjoy. They had not been a very demonstrative family, but in a quiet unfailing way the two had been loved and cared for. They had never felt lonely and had never been really unhappy. What they felt every hour in Aunt Matilda's world was that they counted for nothing with anybody, and were entirely superfluous; and the sense of this filled them with a kind of vague misery they never exactly explained to each other, even when they talked about the differences between their life on the farm and their life in their own home. Their young hearts ached many a day when they were not quite sure why they were aching, or that it was veritable heartache they were troubled by. Being curiously just and given to reasoning by nature,