left her hills, where Daddy Tom was near her,
where there was love for her, where the people and even the snow and
the wild winds were her friends?

She threw herself forward on her arms and gave way utterly, crying in
great, heart-breaking, breathless sobs for her Daddy Tom, for her
home, for her hills.

At five o'clock Sister Rose, coming to see that the music rooms were
aired for the evening use, found Ruth an inert, shapeless little
bundle of broken nerves lying across the piano.

She took the girl to her room and sent for the sister infirmarian.

But Ruth was not sick. She begged them only to leave her alone.

The sisters, thinking that it was the fit of homesickness that every
new pupil in a boarding school is liable to, sent some of the other
girls in during the evening, to cheer Ruth out of it. But she drove
them away. She was not cross nor pettish. But her soul was sick for
the sweeping freedom of her hills and for people who could understand
her.

She rose and dragged her little couch over to the window, where she
could look out and up to the friendly stars, the same ones that peeped
down upon her in the hills.

She did not know the names that they had in books, but she had framed
little pet names for them all out of her baby fancies and the names
had clung to them all the years.

She recognised them, although they did not stand in the places where
they belonged when she looked at them from the hills.

Out among them somewhere was Heaven. Daddy Tom was there, and her
mother whom she had never seen.

Suddenly, out of the night, from Heaven it seemed, there came stealing
into her sense a sound. Or was it a sound? It was so delicate, so
illusive. It did not stop knocking at the portals of the ear as other
sounds must do. It seemed, rather, to steal past the clumsy senses
directly into the spirit and the heart.

It was music. Yes. But it was as though the Soul of Music had freed
itself of the bondage and the body of sound and notes and came
carrying its unutterable message straight to the soul of the world.

It was only the sisters in their chapel gently hymning the _Salve_ of
the Compline to their Queen in Heaven.

Ruth Lansing might have heard the same subdued, sweetly poignant
evensong on every other night. Other nights, her mind filled with
books and its other business, the music had scarcely reached her.
To-night her soul was alive. Her every sense was like a nerve laid
bare, ready to be thr