Page:From the West to the West.djvu/237

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notice of me, your mother, or Grannie, although we all tried to pet and console him. But he went straight to your deserted doorstep, where he lay for a long time moaning like a man in pain. Grannie regularly carried him. food, but he refused to eat for many days, and his wailing and howling could be heard at all hours of the night. But finally your mother won him over, and he now makes his home with us, and seems quite happy and contented. We all thought he would want to leave us and go back to the old house when Lijah took possession of it, but he didn't. He just clung all the closer to us old folks in the cottage; and it would have done your soul good to see the faithful watch he kept over dear old Grannie to the last day of her life. He was conspicuous among the chief mourners at the burial, and lingered alone beside the grave long after we all had returned to our homes."

Jean, recalling her father's words on that far-away ferry-boat, where she had last seen the faithful animal watching and wailing from the river-bank, said, as she looked up from reading her own letters: "Daddie, don't you think now that a dog has a soul?" And her father answered huskily: "I don't see why he hasn't as good a right to a soul as I have."

"Here, Mame," said Jean, "is a letter from Cousin Annie Robinson. Listen. She says: ' Please break it gently to Cousin Mame that her beau ideal of a man, the Reverend Thomas Rogers, took to himself a wife before she had been gone a week. And who should it have been but that detestable Agnes Winter, who used to say such spiteful things about Mame? She won't be as happy after a while as she is now, but she'll know a whole lot more. Who could have believed that so saintly a sinner as the Reverend Thomas would prove so fickle? I hope Mame will see him with our eyes after this. He isn't worthy of her passing thought.' "

Mary, whose dreams for long and weary months had been of a package of letters from the preacher that never