eard; but
Bickersteth saw that the look in the face was much the same as it had
been before. The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other
lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity
and a great weariness filled the countenance. He had come back to the
verge, he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door
had shut fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, the
incompanionable night of forgetfulness.

Bickersteth saw that the travail and strife had drained life and energy,
and that he must not press the mind and vitality of this exile of time
and the unknown too far. He felt that when the next test came the
old man would either break completely, and sink down into another and
everlasting forgetfulness, or tear away forever the veil between himself
and his past, and emerge into a long-lost life. His strength must be
shepherded, and he must be kept quiet and undisturbed until they came to
the town yonder in the valley, over which the night was slowly settling
down. There two women waited, the two Alices, from both of whom had gone
lovers into the North. The daughter was living over again in her young
love the pangs of suspense through which her mother had passed. Two
years since Bickersteth 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 h