She took the match, and knelt with it in her hands; but it only flickered a moment, and went out. “It will not go for me. You must light it yourself.” He knelt beside her and struck another match. “We will try together,” he said, placing it in her fingers and closing his hand about them. He held the trembling fingers and the little spark they guarded steadily against the shaving. It kindled; the flame breathed and brightened and curled upward among the crooked manzanita stumps, illuminating the two entranced young faces bending before it. Miss Frances rose to her feet, and Arnold, rising too, looked at her with a growing dread and longing in his eyes. “You said to-day that you were happy, because in fancy you were at home. Is that the only happiness possible to you here?” “I am quite contented here,” she said. “I am getting acclimated.” “Oh, don't be content: I am not; I am horribly otherwise. I want something--so much that I dare not ask for it. You know what it is,--Frances!” “You said once that I reminded you--of her: is that the reason you--Am I consoling you?” “Good God! I don't want consolation! _That_ thing never existed; but here is the reality; I cannot part with it. I wish you had as little as I have, outside of this room where we two stand together!” “I don't know that I have anything,” she said under her breath. “Then,” said he, taking her in his arms, “I don't see but that we are ready to enter the kingdom of heaven. It seems very near to me.” They are still in exile: they have joined the band of lotus-eaters who inhabit that region of the West which is pervaded by a subtle breath from the Orient, blowing across the seas between. Mrs. Arnold has not yet made that first visit East which is said by her Californian friends to be so disillusioning, and the old home still hovers, like a beautiful mirage, on the receding horizon. FRIEND BARTON'S “CONCERN.” It had been “borne in” upon him, more or less, during the long winter; it had not relaxed when the frosts unlocked their hold and the streams were set free from their long winter's silence, among the hills. He grew restless and abstracted under “the turnings of the Lord's hand upon him,” and his speech unconsciously shaped itself into the Biblical cadences which came to him in his moments of spiritual exercise.