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Thyra could not sleep that night. When the gale came shrieking up the river, and struck the house, she got out of bed and dressed herself. The wind screamed like a ravening beast at her window. All night she wandered to and fro in the house, going from room to room, now wringing her hands with loud outcries, now praying below her breath with white lips, now listening in dumb misery to the fury of the storm.

The wind raged all the next day; but spent itself in the following night, and the second morning was calm and fair. The eastern sky was a great arc of crystal, smitten through with auroral crimsonings. Thyra, looking from her kitchen window, saw a group of men on the bridge. They were talking to Carl White, with looks and gestures directed towards the Carewe house.

She went out and down to them. None of these who saw her white, rigid face that day ever forgot the sight.

“You have news for me,” she said.

They looked at each other, each man mutely imploring his neighbor to speak.

“You need not fear to tell me,” said Thyra calmly. “I know what you have come to say. My son is drowned.”

“We don’t know THAT, Mrs. Carewe,” said Abel Blair quickly. “We haven’t got the worst to tell you–there’s hope yet. But Joe Raymond’s boat was found last night, stranded bottom up, on the Blue Point sand shore, forty miles down the coast.”

“Don’t look like that, Thyra,” said Carl White pityingly. “They may have escaped–they may have been picked up.”

Thyra looked at him with dull eyes.

“You know they have not. Not one of you has any hope. I have no son. The sea has taken him from me–my bonny baby!”

She turned and went back to her desolate home. None dared to follow her. Carl White went home and sent his wife over to her.

Cynthia found Thyra sitting in her accustomed chair. Her hands lay, palms upward, on her lap. Her eyes were dry and burning. She met Cynthia’s compassionate look with a fearful smile.

“Long ago, Cynthia White,” she said slowly, “you were vexed with me one day, and you told me that God would punish me yet, because I made an idol of my son, and set it up in His place. Do you remember? Your word was a true one. God saw that I loved Chester too much, and He meant to take him from me. I thwarted one way when I made him give up Damaris. But one can’t fight against the Almighty. It was decreed that I must lose him–if not in one way, then in another. He has been taken from me utterly. I shall not even have his grave to tend, Cynthia.”

“As near to a mad woman as anything you ever saw, with her awful eyes,” Cynthia told Carl, afterwards. But she did not say so there. Although she was a shallow, commonplace soul, she had her share of womanly sympathy, and her own life had not been free from suffering. It taught her the right thing to do now. She sat down by the stricken creature and put her arms about her, while she gathered the cold hands in her own warm clasp. The tears filled her big, blue eyes and her voice trembled as she said:

“Thyra, I’m sorry for you. I–I–lost a child once–my little first-born. And Chester was a dear, good lad.”

For a moment Thyra strained her small, tense body away from Cynthia’s embrace. Then she shuddered and cried out. The tears came, and she wept her agony out on the other woman’s breast.

As the ill news spread, other Avonlea women kept dropping in all through the day to condole with Thyra. Many of them came in real sympathy, but some out of mere curiosity to see how she took it. Thyra knew this, but she did not resent it, as she would once have done. She listened very quietly to all the halting efforts at consolation, and the little platitudes with which they strove to cover the nakedness of bereavement.