A knock at the door made her dry her eyes hastily, and she was relieved to find that it was not her Cousin Karen who entered, but Swanhild, with a sunny face and blue eyes dancing with excitement.
“Look, Sigrid,” she cried, “here is a parcel which looks exactly like a present. Do make haste and open it.”
They cut the string and folded back the paper, Sigrid giving a little cry of surprise as she saw before her the water-color sketch of Bergen, which had been her father’s last present to her on the day before his death. Unable to pay for it, she had asked the proprietor of the shop to take it back again, and had been relieved by his ready consent. Glancing quickly at the accompanying note, she saw that it bore his signature. It ran as follows:
“MADAME: Will you do me the honor of accepting the water-color sketch of Bergen chosen by the late Herr Falck in October. At your wish I took back the picture then and regarded the purchase as though it had never been made. I now ask you to receive it as a Christmas-gift and a slight token of my respect for the memory of your father,” etc., etc.
“Oh!” cried Sigrid, “isn’t that good of him! And how nice of him to wait for Christmas instead of sending it straight back. Now I shall have something to send to Frithiof. It will get to him in time for the new year.”
“What a splendid idea! I had not thought of that. And we shall have it up here just for Christmas-day. How pretty it is! People are very kind, I think!”
And Sigrid felt the little clinging arm round her waist, and as they looked at the picture together she smoothed back the child’s golden hair tenderly.
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “after all, people are very kind.”
As Preston Askevold had feared, Frithiof bore the troubles much less easily. He was without Sigrid’s sweetness of nature, without her patience, and the little touch of philosophic matter-of-factness which helped her to endure. He was far more sensitive too, and was terribly handicapped by the bitterness which was the almost inevitable result of his treatment by Blanche Morgan, a bitterness which stirred him up into a sort of contemptuous hatred of both God and man. Sigrid, with her quiet common sense, her rarely expressed but very real faith, struggled on through the winter and the spring, and in the process managed to grow and develop; but Frithiof, in his desolate London lodgings, with his sore heart and rebellious intellect, grew daily more hard and morose. Had it not been for the Bonifaces he must have gone altogether to the bad, but the days which he spent every now and then in that quiet, simple household, where kindness reigned supreme, saved him from utter ruin. For always through the darkest part of every life there runs, though we may sometimes fail to see it, this “golden thread of love,” so that even the worst man on earth is not wholly cut off from God, since He will, by some means or other, eternally try to draw him out of death into life. We are astounded now and then to read that some cold-blooded murderer, some man guilty of a hideous crime, will ask in his last moments to see a child who loved him devotedly, and whom he also loved. We are astonished just because we do not understand the untiring heart of the All-Father who in His goodness often gives to the vilest sinner the love of a pure-hearted woman or child. So true is the beautiful old Latin saying, long in the world but little believed, “Mergere nos patitur, sed non submergere, Christus” (Christ lets us sink may be, but not drown).