He looked around him on the village children, who had once been her comrades: they were sick sometimes, they were sometimes hungry, they were often cuffed and scolded in the haste of a moment’s vexation, but they were all of them beloved. There was always some one to pick them up where they fell, to comfort them when they suffered, to bid them play and be glad.
Who was there to comfort this motherless child now that he had forsaken her?
He paid that she should be fed—that she should be clothed; but who pitied her in her childish troubles, who heard her prayers and gave her her morning and evening kiss,—who loved her?
And yet she, whom he had doated on and spoiled to his heart’s delight, was she not likely to crave love more than any of them?
"Ye’ll make ’er that tender and fearsome she won’t be fit to stand up to the world"—his enemy, Mrs. Goodenough, had many a time said to him.
He had hated her for her warning and had spurned it, thinking that he had plenty of time to harden her to the world in future. But was it fair now that he had made her tender, that he should leave her to stand up to the world before she was fit?
The thought troubled him sore, and on this Sabbath evening, as the cruel bells sang their cruel tune: “It ain’t ’er fault no ways, Tom,” it troubled him more than ever.
What was she doing?—who was making the day of rest sweet to her?
And instead of asking himself bitterly why God had saved her from death that He might take her from him after all and leave him desolate, he asked himself why _he_ had snatched her from the river that he might forsake her in her helplessness the very next day? And a heartbreaking picture rose up before him of his little maid thin and sad, hungering for love, pining for him—unconsciously made to feel, in her childish sensitiveness, that she was different from other children; set apart by something that she could not understand, to be less loved—perhaps even to be shunned, despised, neglected! His pretty Daisy—his good little maid—who had never done any harm!
The last bell was dinning it into his ears: “All gone—all gone!” But there was silence at last. The folks were all safe in church, and he was alone in the quiet evening.
Alone, but not at peace; though the land that lay stretched below him, miles upon miles of serene pastures, studded with browsing cattle and brown with tender shades, might well have brought him some measure of serenity.
