Hour after hour of the brief winter's day passed away. Father Bernard came out in search of me and offered me refreshments; but I shook my head. I could not eat, nor drink, nor rest. A strange but powerful apprehension of some coming crisis in my life--some great evil connected with my mother's visit to this place--had laid hold of me, and all my struggles against it were impotent. It was late in the afternoon before she came. I had climbed up to the top of "Calvary" and, with sick heart and longing eyes, was watching the door from which she must issue. Suddenly it was opened and she stood for a moment upon the threshold looking around for me. To my dying day I shall think of her as I saw her then. Her face was the face of a saint--calm, passionless, and happy, with a gentle, chastened happiness. I knew, when I looked upon her, that she had left the burden of her great sorrow behind. But she had paid a price for it. Pale and fragile as she had always appeared, she seemed now to have been wasted by some fierce, scathing ordeal, which had driven out of her features everything human and left only a spiritual life. As she moved slowly forward into the drive and I saw her even more distinctly, she seemed to me to have gained a strange, new beauty; but it was a beauty which made me look upon her with a sudden shuddering fear. I hurried down to her side and she welcomed me with a smile such as I had seldom seen on her face, and which was altogether in harmony with her softened expression. Then she took my arm and we turned towards home. "You are happier now, mother?" I ventured to ask her, and she answered me by silently pressing my arm. We passed down the avenue, thickly strewn with decaying leaves, along the winding lane, and through the gate which led up to Ive's Head Hill. Once or twice as we were making the ascent I fancied that she hung heavily upon my arm and I asked if she were tired; but she only shook her head. We had reached the summit before the terrible fear which had been gnawing at my heart took definite shape. Then, for the first time since we had started upon our return journey, I was able to look into her face, which she had been keeping averted from me, and when I saw the ghastly change which had crept into it, my heart stood still and all my senses seemed numbed with fear. "Mother," I cried, "you are ill! What is the matter? Oh, speak to me--do!"