coming down-stairs on divers errands, was | be into the charnel house of dead hopes Tom Ollison's only source of information. that could never be. She reported that "Mrs. Allan had had a stroke," and later on, "that it was little likely she would ever be about again," though, they said, "there was no danger for the present." In the twilight Mr. Sandison came into the parlor, where Tom was seated rather forlornly. He laid his hand on the young man's shoulder, with a strong and yet a half-caressing grasp. "Come with me," he said; "we will have no more secrets in this house. We will let the fresh air blow through every place, as God means it shall, and as it always must, at last." "Ay, I have been very foolish," broke out Peter Sandison. "I need not tell you the tale. I dare say you have heard as much of it as needs be. I am not the first man and I fear I shall not be the last who has lost his sight of God, and his joy in God's world because he had happened to fall in love with the wrong woman!" The sadness and pain of a lifetime was crystallizing, as in true hearts they always do crystallize, sooner or later, into humor. A good deal of heartbreak goes to the making of epigram. The human mind throws out its sparks, as metals do, beneath hard blows. He led the way up-stairs. He opened one of those mysterious doors - no longer "But do me justice, Tom," he went on. locked - and went straight into the room. "I never meant to make a dramatic senSeeing that Tom hesitated on the thresh-sation in closing up these rooms. In the old, he turned and said, “Come in, come in." What little daylight was still lingering outside found now free access to the apartment, for the white blinds, ashen with age, which had hitherto shut out any obtrusive gaze on the part of inquisitive opposite neighbors, were at last drawn up. The windows themselves, too, had evidently been open for some time, but the gentle breezes of a calm spring day had not yet sufficed wholly to dispel the ancient, stagnant atmosphere, and perhaps it was very well that the fading light was merciful to the dimness and dust of years of neglect. What did Tom see? Tom saw only what, to a heart which has power to understand it, is ever the most tragic sight of any: the signs of a hopeful, cheerful, ordinary life, which has been suddenly arrested by some great blow, some awful agony. He saw nothing but a pretty little apartment, prepared with care and taste, and full of those touches which betray a strong human interest. There was a stand filled with flower-pots in the central window, wherein the dead plants stood like skeletons. There were pictures on the walls, beautiful steel engravings there was one of these standing on a chair, with the hanging-cord drawn through its rings, but not yet knotted. This was Landseer's touching presentment of the faithful dog resting its head on its dead master's coffin. Peter Sandison had put it out of his hands, all those years ago, that he might open a letter which was brought to him- a letter whose mercenary falsehood and perfidy had closed those rooms from that day to this, turning the happy home that was to VOL. XLIX. 2499 LIVING AGE. - first day of my disappointment I locked them up in sheer disheartenment and bitterness, and then I could not bear to face them again, and deferred doing so, and then there seemed no reason why I should, and then it seemed easiest to let them lie as they were, since the rest of the house amply sufficed my needs. I knew that even if they were never opened in my lifetime, they would tell little to those who would come after me. But what a waste it has been! Somebody ought to have made a home out of those rooms all these years. A house which is hindered from producing a home is as great a wrong to humanity as is a field which is kept from producing food." There was silence. Mr. Sandison resumed: "About that poor soul up-stairs, Tom, I need not say anything. She never knew that I was her son till she evidently found it out this morning. I was a desolate infant, Tom, as desolate as was poor Fred, the shopboy. And in mature life I sought out my mother, for I could not believe that she had really intended all that had come upon me. I found her poor and helpless, but fenced in by strong barriers from the shame and reproach of her old sin. O Tom, I could not bear that my words should fling it back upon her, that my hand should tear down the barriers of credit and respect behind which she had entrenched herself. I thought if I once had her in my house, that during years and years of close acquaintance, there would come some softer moment - the vaguest expression of some regretful yearning. Ah, Tom!" The infinite pain in the tone of those last words was his sole expression of the completeness of his disappointment. Tom said nothing. What was there to be said? The young man's mind went back to poor Grace's early confidences, and to the mingled feelings they had aroused within himself. "And so I lost God," said Mr. Sandison in a quiet, even voice. As he spoke, Tom looked up at him, and their eyes met. Perhaps there was some question in those of the younger man. "And so I lost God," Mr. Sandison repeated. "I cannot say I ever ceased to believe in him, but I lost him. Does a poor child cease to believe in his father, when he misses him in a crowded street, and takes the wrong turning, and goes wailing along among the strangers who give little notice to him or his trouble?" Tom could not help reflecting how it was those who had been "infidel" in the deepest sense, unfaithful to all the claims of dutiful love and service, who had been the readiest, and the harshest, in calling this man "atheist." O poor Grace Allan ! O unhappy Mrs. Brander! 66 "I had gone rather deeply into theology in my young days," Mr. Sandison went on. 'My head had asked many questions, without answers to which my intellect would not rest satisfied. But I found that sort of satisfaction would not serve me here. One cannot feed one's heart on abstractions, however logical or poetical. It was a Father and a Friend whom I wanted; a Father whose very face would satisfy me a Friend who would walk with me and take council with me over every step of my way." "And it is wonderful how many lights come out in dark places, when one tries to follow that out. The great doubts and agonies of the human heart cannot be met by anything but the great facts and experiences of human life. You must have noticed that it is only quite lately that I have taken to reading the Gospels, and have left off going over the Proverbs of Solomon, and nothing but the Proverbs, every night, getting through the whole book once every month? I dare say, after what Grace said, you thought I chose that book as being the most practical, or as some people would call it, the 'worldliest,' in the Bible? Tom smiled. "In a way, I did so," Mr. Sandison conceded. "I knew that you had learned the Scriptures from your youth up, and that nothing in them could be new to you, as mere matter of fact or literature. And I knew, by what I had gone through myself, that you would presently get interested in all sorts of intellectual problems about the evidence of miracles, about the precise nature of inspiration, about the puzzle of unfulfilled prophecy, and such like difficulties - all difficulties which our minds must grapple with, according to the lights of our generation, but on which each new generation generally throws new lights, showing the lights of the generations preceding to have been but darkness. I wanted your faith to find instinctively a wider basis, so that fluctuating opinions on any subject might disturb it no more than the rooted tree is disturbed by the summer breeze which lightly stirs its branches. I wanted to bring home to you, that divine wisdom has a strong and sure hand in the conduct of this present life, for that is our best reason for trusting it to lead us through the mists and up the heights. The proph ecies of the Proverbs are not unfulfilled; for we see them worked out in weal or woe in our own lives, and in every life I within our range." "These are the longings of all hearts," said Tom gently. "There seemed no such Father, and no such Friend for me," pursued Mr. Sandison. "And the world I lived in seemed as if it could not have been made and managed by such an one. Tom Ollison, what I am about to say I could say to few, but I think you may understand me. had lost God; I had lost all reflection of "I have felt as you do, sir," said Tom, him in the human faces round me per-"that the most satisfactory answers of haps only because I had looked for him the intellect are no help to the doubts of most where I was least likely to find him. the heart. But I don't think I could have And then it came into my mind that all I got help while standing apart, as you could do, was to try to do my utmost to seemed to stand, sir." act as I should like to think God would act if he was living-a man in the world to-day." - "He who willeth to do God's will, he shall know of Christ's teaching," quoted Tom, in an undertone. "Ay!" said Mr. Sandison fervently. "Ah!" cried Mr. Sandison, "there it is! There are some who seem only able to find God by going out into the wilderness; and we may notice that these hermits were generally men of peculiar history and of peculiar character. Nor do I suppose they themselves ever dreamed that their 66 tuted a white counterpane, which she had found in the linen closet to which she had been given free access; and over the foot of the couch she had thrown, for added warmth, a coarse scarlet blanket. recluse habits had any of the special sanctity which those who admired their final goodness were too ready to attach to them. Those habits were simply a terrible need to those men - an heroic cure for greater loss and evil; and their stories "If the poor thing can't speak and can't show us that this cure worked by way of hear," said Kirsty, speaking audibly as healing them enough to make them sus- she went about the room, "then there's ceptible to some gentle touch which led the more occasion she should see what's them gradually back to as much human pleasant. And there's the master to confellowship as it was possible for them to sider, too. And this is the master's mothbear." He paused. Tom," he said preser, it seems, and there's been terrible ently, "you don't know how much good trouble of some sort. The world's full of you did me when you didn't shun me be- trouble, and there's always somebody's cause of the report you heard. And again, wickedness at the bottom of it. I think when I found that your faithfulness to the master will let me stay and nurse the your father's friend could outweigh the poor old lady. This house is just a heaven charms of the pleasant life at Stockley. to me. Oh! what a fool I was to think And again, by sundry true words you nothing was so good as pleasure and spoke on sundry occasions. Tom, as I finery; and what a price I've paid for my looked into your frank young face, I caught|folly! I wonder if I'll ever want to be again a reflection of the countenance of the divine Father and Friend." Mr. Sandison said this in a slow, dry tone, as if the utterance were difficult. Strong emotion scarcely dares to filter itself through speech, lest speech give way before it. - Tom understood him far too well to breathe a single word. They sat in silence for a long time till the twilight faded into darkness, and there was nothing but the dull glimmer of a street lamp to dimly reveal the outline of their figures and of the furniture. 64 Mr. Sandison was the first to break the spell. He rose up, saying cheerfully, Well, the house is open now. Let God's breeze blow through it, and God's sunshine brighten it, and let us watch patiently to see what living seeds they will bear into it, and bring to blossom within it." He was speaking half of the closed-up and desolate rooms, and half of his own closed-up, desolate heart, of which they had been but the result and the type. That night, before Mr. Sandison went to rest, he stole up to the room where the aged woman lay, in her strange life-indeath. Grace's room had always been comfortable. Peter Sandison had seen to that from the first. But poor Kirsty's zealous efforts had done much for it during her day's attendance. A liberal fire was glowing on the hearth, for the spring nights were still chilly. Kirsty had got the shopboy to bring her in some spring flowers crocuses and daffodils, and these stood in a brown pot on a little table beside the bed. From the bed itself Kirsty had removed the drab coverlid and had substi bad again? I'm feared 1 should, if I was in sight o' folks like the Branders, so I suppose that shows I've not really learned a bit of wisdom yet-except it may be that I'd have sense to keep out of the way of such like. How different it might have been if I'd gone to that watchmaker's quiet house in Edinburgh! And what's to become of poor Hannah? When the master said that if I'd stay and do the nursing he'd get somebody for the house. work I could not help thinking of her, but I daren't mention her, for she can't be trusted to keep from the drink for two hours together.' When Kirsty saw the master coming into the room, she rose from her low seat by the fire, and passed quietly out. Mr. Sandison carried in one hand the big Bible, which he had brought up from the dining-room. In the other hand he had an inkstand, and behind his ear there was a pen. He laid the book on the table beside the invalid. He did not look at her as he did so. She gave a deep groan. He opened the volume, turning to the fly-leaves, between whose severed pages lay the few old papers which that morning had wrought such havoc in a lifetime's hypocrisy. He took them up, one by one, still not looking towards the bed. He turned away and went towards the fire, taking the seat which Kirsty had vacated. He knew that Grace could see every movement. One by one, in no haste, but with gentlest deliberation, he put those papers on the blazing fire. It swiftly caught them up and consumed them utterly. Then he rose, and went back to the open Bible lying on the table. He took the pen, and wrote on the blank fly-leaf, of Mrs. Black's pathetic wish "that Mr. in large, bold characters, "From Peter Sandison to his mother." Then he turned the book, and held it towards the invalid. She could easily read what was written there, and when she had done so she raised her pitiful eyes, and they met his. No word could pass between them now. But she fumbled with her numb hands, and grasped his, and drew it upon her pillow, and kissed it once, twice. Peter Sandison bent down and kissed her cheek. There was a moisture on it. That was all. He summoned Kirsty to resume her watch. And he went away, only waving back his hand before he closed the door. "Thank God!" he said to himself. "And who knows but this might have come to pass long ago, if I had been wiser? Thank God that he will reveal our sins to us, though he will also blot them out! The truth at any cost! Love can strike root in nothing else." CHAPTER XVIII. TWO ON THE CLIFFS. LATE in the following summer, Tom Ollison paid another visit to Clegga. He had been longing very much to do so, but the suggestion finally came from Mr. Sandison. (Had he noticed how much more often those Kirkwall letters had arrived since Tom's last visit to the north?) "I wish you would bring your father back to spend the winter with us, Tom," he said; "don't you think you could persuade him? You know there are plenty of spare rooms now. I never thought how they were wasted, while they were shut up, but now it seems a terrible waste to think of them open and empty." Mr. Sandison did not go very much into those deserted rooms. His life had grown into his parlor and his shop. Still he went into them, determined to lay forever the ghost of the old shrinking. With his own hands he finished hanging the engraving, which he had laid down in his moment of despair nearly a quarter of a century before. With his own hands he threw away the ashen plants which had withered in loneliness, and planted fresh ones whose sweet smell stole through the quiet rooms. He chose none but those with a sweet smell. Mrs. Black sent him roots from Stockley. He even broke his old habits so far as to accompany Tom on a Saturday visit to the mill — perhaps induced to do so by the constant repetitions - - Ollison's great friend should for once see the old place as it always had been since nobody knew what changes might be coming." For the old squire of Stockley was at last gathered to his fathers, and the distant heir, the Branders' friend, Captain Carson, reigned in his stead. And so Tom went off to the far north. But he had first written to his father to ask whether he should not stop at Kirkwall and try to induce Mrs. Sinclair and Olive to accompany him to Shetland and be their guests at Clegga, and take another look at the old places and the old faces which once they had known so well. Did Tom know to what he was steering? In after days he never could be quite sure at what precise point a thought turned into a hope. He sent his invitation beforehand to Mrs. Sinclair and her daughter, and they had many debates over it in the wide old attics which had grown a dear home to them. They had prospered so far that they had ventured to take another room, and Olive had grown used to her unremitting toil, and so accustomed to her constant cares and economies, that she could find interest and excitement in the fluctuations of her earnings. There had been no further encroachment on the little fund realized by her father's life insurance, and Olive was even accumulating tiny savings of her own, made on the sound and sure plan of settling her maximum expenditure by her minimum earnings. Very tiny savings indeed they were, savings which would little avail against disaster if it fairly came, but which might go very far to avert disaster. They would not have supported her in a long illness, but wisely laid out, from time to time, they might do much to preserve health. Olive began to think, hopefully, that however long she might live, and however little she might be able to save, she might continue so useful to the last that she might eat the bread of independence to the end. Only she must be quite sure to outlive her dear mother. Every night and morning she offered that one prayer. Everything else she could cover with the great petition, "Thy will be done," but she could not quite give up this special plea. "And that is only because God's will is not done!" she said to herself. "For if it was, I could surely feel that I might safely leave dear mother to her only son, not only to his support, but to the tenderness of his love and the warmth of his hearth." - When Tom Ollison's invitation came, Olive went to her little store and counted it over, and made many minute calculations. She made up her mind that she and her mother could dare to afford this treat. Under no other circumstances could they get so much pleasure at so low a price. This would cost nothing but their fares in the boat — they would need to make no preparations to enjoy the bountiful hospitality of Clegga. Not that she could bear to go quite empty-handed among the poor old wives and fatherless children who had once been her parent's pensioners; but if she sat up through only one night, her busy fingers would manufacture sundry little gifts for such without cost of money or of working hours. Yes, they would go! Mrs. Sinclair heard her daughter's determination a little wistfully. She had hoped for an invitation to visit her son after his marriage, and she had made up her mind that if one came, why even that sacred "insurance money" must be taken that it might be accepted. It would not be robbing Olive; no, no, once Robert saw his mother, he would be sure to make it up to her; it was not the money that he would grudge, it was only that he didn't quite realize how things were! She was right that it was not the money he grudged in this matter. He would have paid the cost of the journey many times over, so long as she did not take it. (On the same principle or rather no-principle he would probably have liberally aided any impecunious relatives who had known how to thrust their poverty upon him at inconvenient times.) Poor little lady, with her worn black dress, and the patient pain in her beautiful eyes, what a discord her appearance would have struck in his garish, rapid life! "Mother is happiest where she is,” he said to himself. And there was not only heartlessness in the reflection, it ended in a sigh. He felt there was something about him and his wife and his home which would trouble Mrs. Sinclair. "Mother would not derstand," he said, and sighed again. her recognition of points and places which stirred old memories. They had a happy time in dear old Clegga. And in the long, quiet walks which Tom and Olive took together along the roads which waved up and down the low, green hills looking down on the wide blue sea, they opened their hearts and spoke to each other, as hitherto each had only silently thought. And if, as that pleasant sojourn drew to a close, there came long silences in those walks, it was not because they had nothing more to say, but because there was so much to say, which they felt they could trust to each other's thoughts, almost better than to any words. Olive Sinclair owned to herself this much that whether Tom Ollison had loved her or not, she might easily have loved him, only that she knew such feelings were not for her. She would never leave her mother. Well, she had her mother to love and to work for, and what would life be without that? And Tom Ollison asked himself whether it did not seem very hard that Peter Sandison should be left in loneliness at last a loneliness haunted by memories of deprivation and wrong; a very different loneliness from that of his own father, with his wholesome memories, his large local influence, and the cheerful coming to and fro of his prosperous married children. Tom did not feel as if the seed of one's own happiness must be planted in the pain of others, and watered by their tears. But Tom had the masculine right of action and enterprise. Where Olive must have silently taken up what she felt to be her duty, he could seek to elicit her opinion on such matters, and could lead her on from generalities to their own particu lar cases. And so it came to pass that the first breathings of the great love of life between those two, were mingled with tender thoughts of others and careful conun-sideration concerning them. It came to them as the cornerstone placed solemnly on the edifice of affection and duty-not as the missile of a battering-ram rudely hurled against it. They could measure what it must be, by knowing how much these were, and by finding this was supreme above them. So once more the two women went down to the dock and met Tom, and this time they went on board with him. The young, strong man and the high-spirited maiden were very tender and watchful over the little mother. They said aside that this going back would try her a little, and they wondered, in their inexperience, to notice that while her tears would start fast and faster, her smiles also grew brighter, and she became quite eager in And Mrs. Sinclair, with the keen vision of one who had been through these experiences, foresaw what was coming, and so sitting alone on the bench outside Clegga, overlooking the sunny bay, she strove to |