into the garden--he sees me. Welcome back,
Master Zack, welcome back! Hooray! hooray!" Here Mrs. Peckover forgets
her company-manners, and waves the red cotton handkerchief out of the
window in an irrepressible burst of triumph.

Zack's hearty laugh is heard outside--then his quick step on the
stairs--then the door opens, and he comes in with his beaming sunburnt
face healthier and heartier than ever. His first embrace is for his
mother, his second for Madonna; and, after he has greeted every one else
cordially, he goes back to those two, and Mr. Blyth is glad to see
that he sits down between them and takes their hands gently and
affectionately in his.

Matthew Grice is in all their memories, when the first greetings are
over. Valentine and Madonna look at each other--and the girl's fingers
sign hesitatingly the letters of Matthew's name.

"She is thinking of the comrade you have lost," says the painter,
addressing himself, a little sadly, to Zack.

"The only living soul that's kin to her now by her mother's side," adds
Mrs. Peckover. "It's like her pretty ways to be thinking of him kindly,
for her mother's sake."

"Are you really determined, Zack, to take that second voyage?" asks
Valentine. "Are you determined to go back to America, on the one faint
chance of seeing Mat once more?"

"If I am a living man, eighteen months hence," Zack answers resolutely,
"nothing shall prevent my taking the voyage. Matthew Grice loved me like
a brother. And, like a brother, I will yet bring him back--if he lives
to keep his promise and meet me, when the time comes."

*****

The time came; and on either side, the two comrades of former days--in
years so far apart, in sympathies so close together--lived to look each
other in the face again. The solitude which had once hardened Matthew
Grice, had wrought on him, in his riper age, to better and higher ends.
In all his later roamings, the tie which had bound him to those sacred
human interests in which we live and move and have our being--the tie
which he himself believed that he had broken--held fast to him still.
His grim, scarred face softened, his heavy hand trembled in the friendly
grasp that held it, as Zack pleaded with him once more; and, this time,
pleaded not in vain.

"I've never been my own man again" said Mat, "since you and me wished
each other good-bye on the sandhills. The lonesome places have got
strange to me--and my rifle's heavier in hand than ever I knew it