child?" he asked.

"Oh yes, I sometimes thought that through the babe you would be yourself
again. When you were near her you never ceased to look at her and fondle
her, as I thought very timidly; and you would start sometimes and gaze
at me with the old wise look hovering at your eyes. But the look did not
stay. The child was fond of you, but she faded and pined, and one day
as you nursed her you came to me and said: 'See, beloved, the little
one will not wake. She pulled at my beard and said, "Daddy," and fell
asleep.' And I took her from your arms.... There is a chestnut tree
near the door of our cottage at the mine. One night you and I buried her
there; but you do not remember her, do you?"

"My child, my child!" he said, looking out into the night; and he lifted
up his arms and looked at them. "I held her here, and still I never held
her; I fondled her, and yet I never fondled her; I buried her, yet--to
me--she never was born."

"You have been far away, Francis; you have come back home. I waited, and
prayed, and worked with you, and was patient.... It is very strange,"
she continued. "In all these twelve years you cannot remember our past,
though you remembered about this place--the one thing, as if God had
made it so--and now you cannot remember those twelve years."

"Tell me now of the twelve years," he urged.

"It was the same from day to day. When we came from the mountain, we
brought with us the implements of the forge upon a horse. Now and again
as we travelled we cut our way through the heavy woods. You were changed
for the better then; a dreadful trouble seemed to have gone from your
face. There was a strong kind of peace in the valley, and there were so
many birds and animals, and the smell of the trees was so fine, that we
were not lonely, neither you nor I."

She paused, thinking, her eyes looking out to where the Evening Star was
sailing slowly out of the wooded horizon, his look on her. In the pause
the wolf-dog raised its big, sleepy eyes at them, then plunged its head
into its paws, its wildness undisturbed by their presence.

Presently the wife continued: "At last we reached here, and here we
have lived, where no human being, save one, has ever been. We put up the
forge, and in a little hill not far away we found coal for it. The days
went on. It was always summer, though there came at times a sharp frost,
and covered the ground with a coverlet of white. But the birds were
always with us, and