"Only a mother like you! I should like to know where a better could be found! I am sorry for the boy that he has had to live with a cross-grained old maid, but for your sake he ought to have put up with it."
"She means well. She took us in for my father's sake, and she has kept me and the boy from starving."
"You have earned your living; you have worked well for her, and she knows it. But I will go and hunt for Master Jack. See! I will leave my basket of tools here as an assurance that I am coming back. You go and lie down, and I'll have the young master back before an hour is over. Come, go indoors; you look ready to drop."
"I am used to waiting and watching," she said again; "it's nothing new."
Then her eyes began their search up and down the row, with the same wistful, eager gaze.
George Paterson had put the basket of tools just within the doorway, and turning to her said--
"Look up at that strip of blue sky, Patience; look up, not downward so much."
As he spoke he raised his head, and pointed to the narrow bit of sky which made a deeply blue line above the tops of the tall houses.
"That tells of love," he said--"God's love which is over us. Take heart, and lift it up to Him in your trouble."
George spoke out of the fulness of his own heart: not in any way as if he set himself up to lecture his listener, but just simply to try to raise her thoughts from the gnawing anxiety which had laid hold on her.
"Yes," she said, "the bit of sky is beautiful, but it is so far off; and--don't be angry with me, George, but I wish you would go and find him. Let me come with you!" she exclaimed.
"No, no; I shall be quicker than you are. I can get over the ground in half the time."
Neither asked the other where George would look for the truant. Both had one thought--Jack had been to the quay, and was perhaps on board one of the ships lying there. He had threatened before that he would go to sea, and leave Miss Pinckney and her scoldings and fault-findings behind him.
"If it had not been for his mother he would have done so long ago," he said. "He loved the sea, and he wished to be a sailor, as his father had been before him."
As George's quick, firm steps were heard dying away in the distance, Mrs. Harrison pulled a stool towards her out of the shop, and seated herself just within the doorway.