The fair, clear-cut face came warm and living between him and the darkness; her voice called into the vague distance cheerful and strong. She turned back to him glowing with color. "Our boy is there," she said; "and there are others dead that I loved. I always knew they'd keep a watch for us, Jerome!" He listened with a sad smile. "And I've _no_ fear," she went on, energetically, "I never had any fear, that He would give them back to us just misty, holy angels, who could neither cry nor laugh with us, when our very hearts were sick to catch their hands and kiss their lips again.--I know," after a pause, "my boy will come first to me, with his old trick of hiding and calling for 'Mother, mother!'--he'll not forget I liked that name the best; and he'll have the same laugh in his eyes, just the same,--he'd find no better look in heaven than that was. I knew, when I closed his eyes that night, it was but for a little while." Yet she stopped suddenly, putting her hand to her throat to choke back a cry of pain, "A little while," she repeated, firmly. Her husband listened, the smile growing more bitter: she had never seemed more silly or more dear to him than then. "I am not a child," she said, quickly. "It is not fancy. The dead are in Christ's kingdom; and He is alive, not dead, yonder. It was a real man, Jerome, that ascended from the mountain, loving his friend, censuring Peter, taking care of his mother. Mary found no spirit there, when she died, but the son whose baby-head rested on her breast; and I shall find my boy." He soothed her, for she had grown nervous and trembling; let her cling to his neck and cry away her trouble, after the fashion of women who have brought their hearts out to argue for them. "Let us forget that far-away country," he said, after a while, "and go to rest, Lotty. The moans of this storm will wear your strength out,"--leading her to the foot of the chamber-stairway. She went up, pausing at the top to look back, a smile on her flushed cheeks and swollen eyes. "It will be a quiet morning," she said, waving a good-night. There was some meaning in her words which he could not penetrate, but it touched and startled him. "A quiet morning?"