Nevertheless, my heart felt running over with tenderness towards the dear old lady;--as it did towards my father and my sisters, and everything belonging to me in this wide world. When Mrs. Granton went to church, I sat for a long time in the west parlour, reading the Bible, all alone; at least as much alone as I ever can be in this world again, after knowing that Max loves me. It being such an exceedingly mild and warm day--wonderful for the first day of February, an idea came into my head, which was indeed strictly according to “orders;” only I never yet had had the courage to obey. Now, I thought I would. It would please him so, and Mrs. Granton too. So I put on my out-door gear, and actually walked, all by myself, to the hill-top, a hundred yards or more. There I sat down on the familiar bench, and looked round on the well-known view. Ah me! for how many years and under how many various circumstances, have I come and sat on that bench and looked at that view! It was very beautiful to-day, though almost death-like in its supernatural sunshiny calm: such as one only sees in these accidental fine days which come in early winter, or sometimes as a kind of spectral anti-type of spring. Such utter stillness, everywhere. The sole thing that seemed alive or moving in the whole landscape was a wreath of grey smoke, springing from some invisible cottage behind the fir-wood, and curling away upwards till if lost itself in the opal air. Hill, moorland, wood and sky, lay still as a picture, and fair as the Land of Beulah, the Celestial Country. It would hardly have been strange to see spirits walking there, or to have turned and found sitting on the bench beside me, my mother and my halfbrother Harry, who died so long ago, and whose faces in the Celestial country I shall first recognise. My mother.--Never till now did I feel the want of her. It seems only her--only a mother--to whom I could tell, “Max loves me--I am going to be Max's wife.” And Harry--poor Harry, whom also I never knew--whose life was so wretched, and whose death so awful; he might have been a better man, if he had only known my Max. I am forgetting, though, how old he would have been now; and how Max must have been a mere boy when my brother died. I do not often think of Harry. It would be hardly natural that I should; all happened so long ago that his memory has never been more than a passing shadow across the family lives. But to-day, when everyone of my own flesh and blood seemed to grow nearer to me, I thought of him more than once; tried to recall the circumstances of his dreadful end; and then to think of him only as a glorified, purified spirit, walking upon those hills of Beulah. Perhaps now looking down upon me, “baby” that was, whom he was once reported, in one of his desperate visits home, to have snatched out of the cradle and kissed; knowing all that had lately happened to me, and wishing me a happy life with my dear Max.