Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/141

Rh baby daughter, who had never breathed, in one grave under the apple-trees in the south orchard, where he could see the mound from his chamber window. Now was John Bassett, indeed, bereft. The blow told on him heavily. It changed him month by month by a slow benumbing process into a man sadly unlike what he had been before. He had lived, as we said, like a noble pagan. He suffered as the noble pagans used to suffer, with a grim stoicism, an unwilling and resentful surrender to powers he was too feeble to oppose.

Before little Molly was taken ill, she had had a presentiment that she would die, and she had set all her house in the most careful order to leave behind her. Her few little personal ornaments, her two or three bits of lace, and her two silk gowns,—only two, and of the simplest fashion,—she had laid away with bags of lavender in one of the deep drawers in an old-fashioned chest which stood in their chamber. Her common clothes she had packed in a box, and had said to John one day:— "If I don't get well, dear, just give that box to mother; all the things will be of use to her; but the things in the drawer I 'd like to have kept for the baby. I don't believe God will take us both away from you; and I am sure it will be a girl,—a daughter would comfort you more than a son, would n't it, dear? "