"'Yes,' at last said the Quaker lady; 'I heard what you said as I came in, dear. Christmas is a hard time with all its memories. _I think I have found out what we lonely women want. It is a future_. Our thoughts are always turning to the past. There is not anything to link us on to the next generation. You see other women with their families--it is the future to which they look. However good the past has been, they expect more to come, for their sons and their daughters. Their life goes on in other lives.' Hildeguard clasped her hands round her knees and stared into the fire." "Their life goes on in other lives"--the thought finds a home in Hildeguard's mind. When, soon after, the little Quakeress dies, Hildeguard, looking at the quiet face, says to herself: "_Dear little woman! So you have got your future._" But in her own case she does not wait for death to bring it to her; she faces her problems, and, refusing to be swamped by them, makes the currents carry her bark along to the free, open sea. She flings herself whole-heartedly into causes whose hopes rest in the future. She draws around her children, who need her love and care, and makes them her hostages for the future. In all this we see Elsie Inglis describing a stage in her own life. But before the story brings us round again to Christmas, something else has helped to change the outlook for Hildeguard; she has found herself in relation to God. Her religion is no merely inherited thing--not hers at second-hand, this "link with God." It is a real thing to her, found for herself, made part of herself, and so her sure foundation. It has come to her in a flash, a never-to-be-forgotten illumination of the words: "_The Power of an Endless Life_." She faces life now glad and free. In her "den" on that Christmas Eve she is described thus to us by Elsie Inglis: "Ann had put holly berries over the pictures, and the mantelpiece, too, was covered with it. Between the masses of green and the red berries stood the solid, old-fashioned, gilt frames of long ago, the photographs in them becoming yellow with age. Hildeguard turned to them from the portraits on the walls. She stood, her hands resting on the edge of the mantelpiece. Then suddenly it came to her that her whole attitude towards life and death had altered. For long these old photographs had stood to her as symbols of a past glowing with happiness. Though the pain still lingered even after time had dulled the edge, yet the old pictures typified all that was best in life, and the dim mist of the years rose up between the good days and her. "But now, as she looked, her thoughts did not turn to the past. In some unexplained way the loves of long ago seemed to be entwined with a future so wonderful and so enticing that her heart bounded as she thought of it.