CHAPTER VI.
TAKEN BY SURPRISE.
After that first outburst of grief, Thomas Dawson did not speak much of his trouble, but it was none the less deep for that.

In fact, it was so deep, and the wound was such a cruel one, it was almost more than he could bear.
The thought of his dead daughter never left him.

Through the day, when he was at work, through the long evenings when he sat silent and sad, gazing into the fire, and through the nights when he lay sleepless, he brooded over the wrongs his daughter's husband had done them all, and was full of remorse for his own hard-heartedness--as he called it now--in not having forgiven her at once when she ran away from her home.

And more than all was he haunted by the thought of her lonely death after her cruelly hard life.

He pictured her lying in her pauper's grave in an unknown burial-ground, away amongst strangers, unknown, uncared for, unremembered, and these thoughts aged him fast.
Jessie was too young to notice it, but those older saw how he began to stoop, how his feet lagged as he walked, how the colour had faded from his hair and from the bright blue eyes, which had been such a noticeable feature of his face.