the solitary crow was still walking busily about in
the frozen pasture. And again she remembered the vultures that hulked
and waddled amid the debris of the burned Mission.

Only that had been in May; and above the sunny silence in that place
of death had sounded the unbroken and awful humming of a million
million flies....

* * * * *

And so, her husband being now hopelessly broken and useless, they had
come back with their child, Ruhannah, to their home in Brookhollow.

Here they had lived ever since; here her grey life was passing; here
her daughter was already emerging into womanhood amid the stark,
unlovely environments of a country crossroads, arid in summer, iron
naked in winter, with no horizon except the Gayfield hills, no outlook
save the Brookhollow road. And that led to the mill.

She had done what she could--was still doing it. But there was nothing
to save. Her child's destiny seemed to be fixed.

Her husband corresponded with the Board of Missions, wrote now and
then for the _Christian Pioneer_, and lived on the scanty pension
allowed to those who, like himself, had become incapacitated in line
of duty. There was no other income.

There was, however, the six thousand dollars left to Ruhannah by her
grandmother, slowly accumulating interest in the Mohawk Bank at
Orangeville, the county seat, and not to be withdrawn, under the terms
of the will, until the day Ruhannah married or attained, unmarried,
her twenty-fifth year.

Neither principal nor interest of this legacy was available at
present. Life in the Carew family at Brookhollow was hard sledding,
and bid fair to continue so indefinitely.

* * * * *

The life of Ruhannah's father was passed in reading or in gazing
silently from the window--a tall, sallow, bearded man with the eyes of
a dreaming martyr and the hands of an invalid--who still saw in the
winter sky, across brown, snow-powdered fields, the minarets of
Trebizond.

In reading, in reflection, in dreaming, in spiritual acquiescence,
life was passing in sombre shadows for this middle-aged man who had
been hopelessly crushed in Christ's service; and who had never
regretted that service, never complained, never doubted the wisdom and
the mercy of his Leader's inscrutable manoeuvres with the soldiers who
enlist to follow Him. As far as that is concerned, the Reverend
Wilbour Carew had been born with a