they stretch panting to grasp it?

The certainty of meeting her brother, the anticipation of all that she
felt assured he would promise concerning his future, when he learned
the severity of the ordeal which she had endured in his behalf, blotted
out the costliness of the accomplishment. Like that glorious violet
haze of Indian Summer, which was drawing its opalescent drapery along
the vanishing iron railway track blackened with cinders, and softly
shrouding the grim outlines of wreck, that told where a vessel had
foundered on the lake in the early autumn gale, an overruling
Providence seemed shedding peace even upon her troubled past. In the
swift flash of the divine fire that sanctified the accepted sacrifice,
she was too dazzled to remember the moan of the slaughtered victim, the
agony of the death struggle; and now, her thoughts spanned the gulf of
time, and painted the eternal reunion of the broken and dishonored
family group.

From these comforting reflections she was aroused by a piercing cry
that made her spring forward, and scan the crowd of human faces
collected close to the rails, at a small town where the cars had halted.

On a side track in front of her window, was a train which had just
dashed in from Buffalo, and amid the surging mass of jeering
spectators, two officers stepped down from the platform, each with a
hand on the arm of a man, who was heavily handcuffed. At the sight, a
white-haired, withered woman leaning from a carriage and staring with
horror-haunted eyes, had screamed, and was falling back insensible.

"That is his mother. Poor thing, why did they let her come? He is her
only boy," said a man to his comrade, who stood near Beryl's seat.

"What is the matter?" asked a gentleman, sitting immediately in front
of her.

"Two of our officers winged a bird, who thought it was safe flying over
yonder, with the lake between him and the county jail. Canada is handy
hunting-ground, when the game happens to be runaway thieves; and we
have bagged one. He was the cashier of our Savings Bank, and not
satisfied with tampering with the books, and forcing balances, he
finally robbed the vault of a lot of gold, and flew across the line.
His wife met him at St. Catherine's, and he met the iron bracelets he
was dodging."

The train moved on, and once more Beryl heard the howling of the
wolves, that she had hoped were left forever behind; that now seemed in
full cry bearing down upon their prey. Should