So time passes again, and Dan goes up to division headquarters at Barlow to dispatch trains, and Michael gives a last order as assistant roadmaster and comes home to his long sickness. And now Molly is alone in the little house, settled down to keep blooming the memories of it along with the hollyhocks of the garden beyond the lattice with the morning-glory vines trailing over. Time fades her face, but 't is still uplifted and lighted, and later she is seen among the flowers till they die in the fall, and winter coming down she sits at her window knitting a shawl as the snow is knitted without. But deep is her grieving over Dan, who is by this time superintendent, with his policy of pull-down and trample-under, dreaded by all round him. Two or three times a year he will stop his special at Turntable, and seated in the little parlor he seems a glowing metal mass of a man to Molly, standing apart in awe of him. But the time is at hand when she must appeal to him or never at all in this world, so the saints inspire her to speak a message to the man of power and she smiles with shy pride of their confidence in her. "Faith, I will talk to him as a boy again," she plans; "'Danny,' I will say, 'when the lanterns of the yard do beckon to your ambition is there not one light above and beyond, brighter than all the others, which beckons the spirit?' Then he will be guided by it," reasons old Molly with her solemn gaze fixed on the future of Dan. But it chances that Dan's visit is delayed and Molly feels that the saints are impatient of her worldly lingering. "I must put the message into writing lest it be lost entirely," she says then. "Anyhow Danny will read it over and over in memory of me, having that tender a heart toward his mother, for all his hardness to others." So that the message of the farthest lantern is at last about to be written, on an evening when the little cottage with crusted eaves and hoary glimmering windows seems but the bivouac of winter elves in folk story. And as old Molly by the cleared table, with pen in hand and bottle of ink and the paper she bought when Michael died--to write his second cousin in Kildare a letter of sympathy, y' understand--as old Molly makes ready for the writing, after a stick laid on the fire and hearth brushed, the snow drifts solidly to the window but is swept clean of the doorstep, leaving a scratch of firelight under the door on the path beyond. "The Farthest Lantern," she writes, as a headline, for 't is certain that Danny before reading will wish to know what it is about; and then pleased with the successful beginning she holds it up to the shaded lamp to read over, then because of the wrinkled hands shaking lays it down on the table, surely as steady as rock.