No such thoughts, however, intruded themselves on Maddy’s mind. She did not look away from the present, except it were at the past, in which she feared she had erred by leaving her grandmother too much alone. But to her passionate appeals for forgiveness, if she ever had neglected the dying one, there came back only loving looks and mute caresses, the aged hand smoothing lovingly the bowed head, or pressing fondly the girlish cheeks where Guy’s hand had been. With the coming of daylight, however, there was a change; and Maddy, listening intently, heard what sounded like her name. The tied tongue was loosed for a little, and in tones scarcely articulate, the disciple who for long years had served her Heavenly Father faithfully, bore testimony to the blessed truth that God’s promises to those who love Him are not mere promises—that He will go with them through the river of death, disarming the fainting soul of every fear, and making the dying bed the very gate of heaven. This tribute to the Savior was her first thought, while the second was a blessing for her darling, a charge to seek the narrow way now in life’s early morning. Disjointed sentences they were, but Maddy understood them all, treasuring up every word even to the last, the words the farther apart and most painfully uttered, “You—will—care—and—comfort——” She did not say whom, but Maddy knew whom she meant; and without then realizing the magnitude of the act, virtually accepted the burden from which Guy was so anxious to save her. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BURDEN. Grandma Markham was dead, and the covered sleigh, which late in the afternoon plowed its way heavily back to Aikenside, carried only Mrs. Noah, who, with her forehead tied up in knots, sat back among the cushions, thinking not of the peaceful dead, gone forever to the rest which remains for the people of God, but of the wayward Guy, who had resisted all her efforts to persuade him to return with her, instead of staying where he was, not needed, and where his presence was a restraint to all save one, and that one Maddy, for whose sake he stayed. “She’d be vummed,” the indignant old lady said, “if she would not write to Lucy herself if Guy did not quit such doin’s,” and thus resolving she kept on her way, while the subject of her wrath was, it may be, more than half repenting of his decision to stay, inasmuch as he began to have an unpleasant consciousness of himself being in everybody’s way.