a rule, use their dining-rooms to sit in, keeping the
drawing-rooms for company only. This is always presupposing that they
have no extra sitting-room. After all, a dining-room is not a bad place
for the family gathering, having a large table as an objective plane for
a round game, which also serves as a support for reading matter; while
from an economical point of view it preserves the drawing-rooms in
reception stiffness and ceremonious newness.

The apartment they entered was large and square, and contained the
regulation chairs, table, and silver and crystal loaded sideboard.

Upon the mantel-piece, the unflickering light from a waxen taper burning
in a glass of oil lent an unusual air of Sabbath quiet to the room.

"I have 'Yahrzeit' for my mother," explained Jo Lewis, glancing toward
the taper after greeting his visitors. He sat down quietly again.

"Do you always burn the light?" asked Arnold.

"Always. A light once a year to a mother's memory is not much to ask of
a son."

"How long is it since you lost your mother?" questioned Ruth, gently.

Jo Lewis was a man with whom she had little in common. To her he
seemed to have but one idea,--the amassing of wealth. With her more
intellectual cravings, the continual striving for this, to the exclusion
of all higher aspirations, put him on a plane too narrow for her
footing. Unpolished he certainly was, but the rough, exposed grain of
his unhewn nature showed many strata of strength and virility. In this
gentle mood a tenderness had come into view that drew her to him with a
touch of kinship.

"Thirty years," he answered musingly,--"thirty years. It is a long time,
Ruth; but every year when I light the taper it seems as if but yesterday
I was a boy crying because my mother had gone away forever." The strong
man wiped his eyes.

"The little light casts a long ray," observed Ruth. "Love builds its
own lighthouse, and by its gleaming we travel back as at a leap to that
which seemed eternally lost."

Jo Lewis sighed. Presently the thoughts that so strongly possessed him
found an outlet.

"There was a woman for you!" he cried with glowing eyes. "Why, Arnold,
you talk of men being great financiers; I wonder what you would have
said to the powers my mother showed. We were poor, but poor to a degree
of which you can know nothing. Well, with a large family of small
children she struggled on alone and managed to keep us not only alive,
but clean and respectable. In o