e would have said, but the word choked
her. "How soon shall we get there?" she asked faintly. She was so
ill, so weary, that the mere thought of being still again--even in the
death-visited home--was a relief, and she was really too much worn out
to feel very acutely while they drove through the familiar streets.

At last, early in the cold, new year's morning, they were set down in
Guilford Square, at the grim entrance to Persecution Alley. She looked
round at the gray old houses with a shudder, then her father drew her
arm within his, and led her down the dreary little cul-de-sac. There
was the house, looking the same as ever, and there was Aunt Jean coming
forward to meet them, with a strange new tenderness in her voice and
look, and there was Tom in the background, seeming half shy and afraid
to meet her in her grief, and there, above all, was the one great
eternal void.

To watch beside the dying must be anguish, and yet surely not such keen
anguish as to have missed the last moments, the last farewells, the last
chance of serving. For those who have to come back to the empty house,
the home which never can be home again, may God comfort them--no one
else can.

Stillness, and food, and brief snatches of sleep somewhat restored
Erica. Late in the afternoon she was strong enough to go into her
mother's room, for that last look so inexpressibly painful to all, so
entirely void of hope or comfort to those who believe in no hereafter.
Not even the peacefulness of death was there to give even a slight, a
momentary relief to her pain; she scarcely even recognized her mother.
Was that, indeed, all that was left? That pale, rigid, utterly changed
face and form? Was that her mother? Could that once have been her
mother? Very often had she heard this great change wrought by death
referred to in discussions; she knew well the arguments which were
brought forward by the believers in immortality, the counter arguments
with which her father invariably met them, and which had always seemed
to her conclusive. But somehow that which seemed satisfactory in the
lecture hall did not answer in the room of death. Her whole being seemed
to flow out into one longing question: Might there not be a Beyond--an
Unseen? Was this world indeed only

"A place to stand and love in for an hour,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it?"

She had slept in the afternoon, but at night, when all was still, she
could not sleep. The qu