ckersteth had gone,
and not a sign!

Yet, if the girl had looked from her bedroom window, this Friday night,
she would have seen on the far hill a sign; for there burned a fire beside
which sat two travellers who had come from the uttermost limits of snow.
But as the fire burned--a beacon to her heart if she had but known it--she
went to her bed, the words of a song she had sung at choir-practice with
tears in her voice and in her heart ringing in her ears. A concert was to
be held after the service on the coming Sunday night, at which there was
to be a collection for funds to build another mission-house a hundred
miles farther north, and she had been practising music she was to sing.
Her mother had been an amateur singer of great power, and she was renewing
her mother's gift in a voice behind which lay a hidden sorrow. As she
cried herself to sleep the words of the song which had moved her kept
ringing in her ears and echoing in her heart:

"When the swallows homeward fly,
And the roses' bloom is o'er--"

But her mother, looking out into the night, saw on the far hill the fire,
burning like a star, where she had never seen a fire set before, and a
hope shot into her heart for her daughter--a hope that had flamed up and
died down so often during the past year. Yet she had fanned with
heartening words every such glimmer of hope when it came, and now she went
to bed saying, "Perhaps he will come to-morrow." In her mind, too, rang
the words of the song which had ravished her ears that night, the song she
had sung the night before her own husband, Dyke Allingham, had gone with
Franklin to the Polar seas:

"When the swallows homeward fly--"

As she and her daughter entered the little church on the Sunday evening,
two men came over the prairie slowly toward the town, and both raised
their heads to the sound of the church-bell calling to prayer. In the eyes
of the younger man there was a look which has come to many in this world
returning from hard enterprise and great dangers, to the familiar streets,
the friendly faces of men of their kin and clan--to the lights of home.

The face of the older man, however, had another look. It was such a
look as is seldom seen in the faces of men, for it showed the struggle
of a soul to regain its identity. The words which the old man had
uttered in response to Bickersteth's appeal before he fainted
away--"Franklin--Alice--the