Page:Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920).djvu/83

Rh “There, run along, little girl. Good-by,” he said gently.

“Why don’t you ask me to come and see you again?” cried Rachel, half in tears. “I’m coming anyhow.”

“If you can come, come,” he said. “If you don't come, I shall know it is because you can’t — and that is much to know. I’m very, very, very glad, little woman, that you have come once.”

Rachel was sitting demurely on the skids when her companions came back. They had not seen her leaving the house, and she said not a word to them of her experiences. She only smiled mysteriously when they asked her if she had been lonesome.

That night, for the first time, she mentioned her father’s name in her prayers. She never forgot to do so afterwards. She always said “bless mother — and father,” with an instinctive pause between the two names — a pause which indicated new realization of the tragedy which had sundered them. And the tone in which she said “father” was softer and more tender than the one which voiced “mother.”

Rachel never visited the Cove again. Isabella Spencer discovered that the children had been there, and, although she knew nothing of Rachel’s interview with her father, she told the child that she must never again go to that part of the shore.

Rachel shed many a bitter tear in secret over this