Fling your seed abroad, and know
God sends tomorrow,
The rain to make it grow.
--BLACKIE.

There are epochs in every life that cut it sharply asunder, its
continuity is broken and things can never be the same again. This was
the dominant feeling that came to Thora Ragnor, as she sat with her
mother one afternoon in early January. It was a day of Orkney's most
uncomfortable and depressing kind, the whole island being swept by
drifting clouds of vapour, which not only filled the atmosphere but
also the houses, so that everything was to the touch damp and
uncomfortable. Nothing could escape its miserable contact, even
sitting on the hearthstone its power was felt; and until a good
northwester came to dissipate the damp moisture, nobody expected much
from any one's temper.

Thora was restless and unhappy. Her life appeared to have been
suddenly deprived of all joy and sunshine. She felt as if everything
was at an end, or might as well be, and her mother's placid, peaceful
face irritated her. How could she sit knitting mufflers for the
soldiers in the trenches, and not think of Boris and also of Ian, whom
they had all conspired to send to the same danger and perhaps death?
She could not understand her mother's serenity. It occurred to her
this afternoon, that she might have run away with Ian to Shetland and
there her sisters would have seen her married; and she did not do
this, she obeyed her parents, and what did she get for it? Loneliness
and misery and her lover sent far away from her. Oh, those moments
when Virtue has failed to reward us and we regret having served her!
To the young, they are sometimes very bitter.

And her mother's calmness! It not only astonished, it angered her. How
could she sit still and not talk of Boris and Ian? It was a necessary
relief to Thora, their names were at her lips all day long. But Thora
had yet to learn that it is the middle-aged and the old who have the
power of hoping through everything, because they have the knowledge
that the soul survives all its adventures. This is the great
inspiration, it is the good wine which God keeps to the last. The old,
the way-worn, the faint and weary, they know this as the young can
never know it.

However, we may say to bad weather, as to all other bad things, "this,
too, will pass," and in a couple of days the sky was blue, the sun
shining, and the atmosphere fresh and clear and full of life-giving