always see crowning her hair. The little jade god, his gift, still grinned like a merry Billiken. This and all the other mutely eloquent things she saw through a mist—but not of tears. She felt that she could not have cried over any catastrophe now.
She went to the window and leaned out. The old sweet fragrance of the honeysuckle, the apple-orchard, the silver grey of the sea, were the same—yet not at all the same.
She looked at the sky beyond the trees. Clouds, feebly lit by flashes of far-off lightning, obscured the Western half, but one gold star still shone in the East, by the Light. Maybe Ben was in that star, awaiting her. Absurd fancy, of course, but as with all our ideas of Heaven hers were not so very clearly defined, and, in the dulling monotony of grief, like Ben on his far away island, she had slipped back into the childlike mind.
"Some day, dearest, we'll be together again." And, for the time, it comforted her, the mere trying to believe it so.
So at last the tears welled in her eyes, stole down her cheeks, and lay on the white veil like dew on the pure anemones in Spring.
Above, the great eye of the Light opened and shut, opened and shut, as it had for so many years. Then the clouds travelled over the face of the star. And on the stairs below, sounded the "tamp, tamp, tamp," of a cane, seeming as immemorial and importunate as the summons of Fate in the Beethoven symphony. Over the threshold she stepped at last—and went down to them.
Then the three,—Aunt Abigail, Cap'n Bluster, and the
