hree brown-paper parcels;
and the third--

"Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!" That scream went like a knife into the heart
of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows
to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little
girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly
round her.

* * * * * *

"I knew something wonderful was going to happen," said Bobbie, as they
went up the road, "but I didn't think it was going to be this. Oh, my
Daddy, my Daddy!"

"Then didn't Mother get my letter?" Father asked.

"There weren't any letters this morning. Oh! Daddy! it IS really you,
isn't it?"

The clasp of a hand she had not forgotten assured her that it was. "You
must go in by yourself, Bobbie, and tell Mother quite quietly that it's
all right. They've caught the man who did it. Everyone knows now that it
wasn't your Daddy."

"_I_ always knew it wasn't," said Bobbie. "Me and Mother and our old
gentleman."

"Yes," he said, "it's all his doing. Mother wrote and told me you had
found out. And she told me what you'd been to her. My own little girl!"
They stopped a minute then.

And now I see them crossing the field. Bobbie goes into the house,
trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the
right words to "tell Mother quite quietly" that the sorrow and the
struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come
home.

I see Father walking in the garden, waiting--waiting. He is looking at
the flowers, and each flower is a miracle to eyes that all these months
of Spring and Summer have seen only flagstones and gravel and a little
grudging grass. But his eyes keep turning towards the house. And
presently he leaves the garden and goes to stand outside the nearest
door. It is the back door, and across the yard the swallows are
circling. They are getting ready to fly away from cold winds and keen
frost to the land where it is always summer. They are the same swallows
that the children built the little clay nests for.

Now the house door opens. Bobbie's voice calls:--

"Come in, Daddy; come in!"

He goes in and the door is shut. I think we will not open the door or
follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it
will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the
field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy
roses and