"God help me never to live to leave such a feeling behind me," he thought to himself solemnly.
Life after this should have settled down into the usual groove again, and so Jessie thought, with the difference that a great discomfort and ever-present dread would be gone.

Somehow, though, it did not.
Mrs.Lang, looking ill, and worn to a shadow, seemed grave and abstracted, and full of thoughts which she did not share with any one.

She was often absent, too, on business of which she did not speak.

At first Jessie noticed none of all this, she thought her mother's manner was simply the result of the shock and the trouble she had been through; then, by degrees, it came to her that things were different, that there was something in the air that she could not understand or explain, but she felt that changes were impending.
Often when she looked up she found her mother gazing at her wistfully, it seemed, and questioningly.

More than once, too, she drew Jessie on to talk of her old home and her grandparents, and of her longing to see them again; and then one day her mother came to her and asked her if she remembered her grandfather's address! Jessie knew then that her surmises were correct, and her heart beat fast with wonderment and hopes and fears, and a thousand questions poured through her brain..