rts
with the simplicity of his pleading."

Sarah folded her thin hands over the woman's picture.

"I like his mother's face," she murmured, faintly. "And I'm jealous of
her, Cal! You don't have to remind me of the rest of it, either, for I
recall it all. She died, and he--he went all to pieces. They said, at
his death, that he was destitute. And when he did follow
her--across--they hunted everywhere, didn't they, and never found the
boy? Didn't some of the newspapers argue that a servant--a
gardener--had stolen him?"

Caleb nodded his head.

"Most of them ridiculed the suggestion, but it was true, just the same.
That servant was Old Tom. And the only defense he makes is just one
line or so in--in this." Caleb dropped a hand upon the half legible
pages. "He says that he wasn't going to let civilization make of the
boy's life the wreck which he, poor, queer, honest soul, thought it had
made of his father's. And do you know, Sarah, do you know, I can't
help but believe that this over-zealous thing which the law would have
prosecuted was the best thing he could have done? I'll take these
things, now, and lock them in the safe for the boy, until he--until he
comes back home!"

But Sarah Hunter kept the picture of Stephen O'Mara's mother separate
from the rest; she took it upstairs with her when she went, white and
tired-faced, to bed. And it was Sarah's faith which outlasted the
years which followed. She never weakened in her belief that some day
the boy would come back--she and one other whose faith in his last
boyish promise, phrased in bitterness, also endured. For during the
next five years there was not a summer which brought Allison into the
hills but what the first question of his daughter Barbara, motherless
now herself, was of Steve.

"Has--has Stephen come back?" she asked invariably.

At first the query was marked by nothing more than a child's naive
eagerness; and later, when it was brought up in a casual, by-the-way
fashion, it was, nevertheless, tinged with hope. Five years lengthened
into ten, and still Steve did not come. But whenever Barbara asked
that question Caleb remembered, as though it had happened only
yesterday, that morning when she first appeared to the boy.

He wondered sometimes what Steve's reception of her would be now--if he
did come back! The thought supplied many idle hours with food for
speculation for Barbara Allison, year by year, had grown into that
slender, d