Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/126

112 wide sea's open highways. The life might be hard for those who do business in great waters, but it was not mere hardship, as she knew, which wore away body and soul. It was the smirch of big cities which dulled the wholesome buoyancy of the blood. And instinctively Mrs. Reinhart felt for the foreign envelope she had received from Sweden the same morning, and which she had thrust into her pocket on starting out on her errand to Mr. Knowler. It was from her dead husband's mother, to whom she wrote regularly, but whose letter she had forgotten in her anxiety of the morning. She was glad of anything to distract her thoughts now, and tore it open in the street.

"Come, my daughter," the cramped foreign writing ran, " I am fast growing old and need younger eyes than mine about the farm. If you fear to cross the seas alone, my brother is plying between London and Gottenburg. You will find him at Millwall till Saturday. Delay no more, my child. Come when he sails. Ask only for the Eidelweiss, he will bring you surely to me . . . ."

The offer was one that had been made many times, but that the widow had regularly refused on account of her determination to remain near her son.

"Had her presence availed anything?" she asked herself, as she turned down a neglected-looking street running eastward off the Hampstead Road, and climbed the mildewed steps of a squalid house, guarded by a somewhat forbidding row of rusty railings, which stood on the left-hand side of the way.

"Had either entreaty or remonstrance availed?" The reiteration of the thought was disheartening during the long hours of the afternoon as her work fell from her lap and her eye wandered to the rocking tree-tops, which now and again touched the blurred window pane. The room was directly under the roof, so that the Rh