o her, and she could clasp hands with the past quite
confidently and joyously.

"Home! home!" The word thrilled and thrilled through her being, and on
every hand she noted the touch of Sandy Morley with tender
appreciation. She laughed, too, this thin, pale girl, and could Sandy
have seen her then he would have thought her shining white face, set in
the dark furs, more like, than ever, the dogwood bloom under the pines!

"And here I met him on The Way!" Cynthia paused at the spot where she
had stood that spring morning, and saw, with a shock of disappointment,
the man who had usurped her childish ideal of Sandy Morley.

"How lonely he must have been--when I did not know him! Oh! Sandy--to
think I did not know you. You, with your brave, kind eyes and your
tender heart!"

A tear rolled down the uplifted face. It was a tear of joy, for
Cynthia was going to Sandy. From the unrest and unreality she had fled
to him feeling confident that he would gather up the tangled and
dropped threads of her life, and weave them, somehow, into a new and
perfect pattern. She had so much to tell him! And he was there, close
to her! Waiting, waiting for her to come to him and she could afford
to dally by the wayside; gather up the precious memories--so like toys
of the child she once had been and, by and by, she would go to him like
a little girl tired of her day's wandering, and he would comfort her!

By the time Cynthia reached Theodore Starr's church all the heaviness
of recent happenings was forgotten; it had no part in her thought. The
church was gay in Christmas green and red holly berries. The morning
sun, quite high by now, shone in the windows.

"Father!" whispered the girl as if in prayer, and then she knelt, where
once her childish feet had borne her in terror, and buried her face in
her hands. How well she now understood her dear, dead father! Strong
in human love and sympathy, incapable of inflicting pain--even when
pain would have been better and kinder than the lack of it--how like
him she, the daughter, was! How she had slipped aside from the right
path because weak desire to escape, or inflict pain, had been her
portion. Well, she had suffered; had endured her exile; been
mercifully spared from worse things, and now God had led her--home!

The unseen presence seemed to bend pityingly from the rude desk-pulpit
and comfort the gentle heart of the returned wanderer.

Presently, choosing a time when the s