in the ash-heap in front of the shed;
and they stopped to watch with bright eyes the stranger's approach. From
under the apple-trees the horses whinnied to him lonesomely. It was very
peaceful; but the peacefulness of it bore down upon Reuben's soul like
lead. It seemed as if the end of things had come. He feared to lift the
latch of the well-known door.

As he hesitated, trembling, he observed that the white blinds were down
at the sitting-room windows. The window nearest him was open, and the
blind stirred almost imperceptibly. Behind it, now, his intent ear
caught a sound of weary sobbing. At once he seemed to see all that was
in the shadowed room. The moveless, shrouded figure, the unresponding
lips, the bowed heads of the mourners, all came before him as clearly as
if he were standing in their midst. He leaned against the door-post, and
at this moment the door opened. Celia's father stood before him.

The old man's face was drawn with his grief. Something of bitterness
came into his eyes as he looked on Reuben.

"You've heard, then!" he said harshly.

"I know!" shaped itself inaudibly on Reuben's lips.

At the sight of his anguish the old man's bitterness broke. "You've come
in time for the funeral," he exclaimed piteously. "Oh, Reube, if you'd
stayed it might have been different!"

"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him."

It was just before dawn, and a grayness was beginning to trouble the
dark about the top of the mountain.

Even at that cold height there was no wind. The veil of cloud that hid
the stars hung but a hand-breadth above the naked summit. To eastward
the peak broke away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the valleys
and the lower hills. Just under the brow, on a splintered and creviced
ledge, was the nest of the eagles.

As the thick dark shrank down the steep like a receding tide, and the
grayness reached the ragged heap of branches forming the nest, the young
eagles stirred uneasily under the loose droop of the mother's wings. She
raised her head and peered about her, slightly lifting her wings as she
did so; and the nestlings, complaining at the chill air that came in
upon their unfledged bodies, thrust themselves up amid the warm feathers
of her thighs. The male bird, perched on a jutting fragment beside the
nest, did not move. But he was awake. His white, narrow, flat-crowned
head was turned to one side, and his yellow eye, under its straight,
fierce lid, watched the pale