Once in the room and her plunder arranged in some great blue jars, something either in the air or in an unconscious glance exchanged between the men made her start and then look from one to the other, and kneeling by her father’s chair, she took his face between her hands, and scanning every line said:— “You are more tired to-day, Daddy, when I thought the bright frosty air would begin to make you better, or did I stay too long and make you worry, dearest?” Then springing up lightly, she followed father, who, without leavetaking, was stealing from the room. “What is it, Dr. Russell?” she panted, when they had reached the end of the passage; “has anything happened since I went away? Are there any new symptoms?” “Your father and I have been talking of grave things, dear child,” he answered; “no, there is nothing new,” and afterward he confessed that he was coward enough almost to run away. Reëntering the room, she again dropped to her place by her father’s knee; now it was his turn to take her face between his hands and draw her to him, seeking by unavailing tenderness to break the force of the blow that must come. “What is it, father?” asked the lips, but before the words were framed, her heart knew the truth. Hiding her head against the breast where her mother had pressed it, more than twenty years before, and forgetting everything except that she had become a child again in her dread, she sobbed, “You must not go without me, for I cannot stay behind alone; wait, oh, father, do wait a little longer.” “Beloved,—my heart flower,—your mother went alone, and yet I have stayed until now. Do you know what she said when she knew that she must first tread the path and she laid you in my arms? ‘Whatever else she must lack, let it not be love,’ and for this I have lived and hoped. Some day there will dawn in and for you a love to which mine will become as the shadow. Keep the soul windows open lest it pass by, even as we open the house windows to air and sun.” Then for another whole month the arrow lay hid in the quiver, until Rosalind sometimes dreamed that it was not there at all. Oftentimes they would sit all day in the deep bay-window of her father’s chamber with the October sunshine piercing them and the call notes of the migrant birds falling from the trees now scant of leaf, until plans had been made between the two as for the separation of a necessary journey. But all this time, Catharine held aloof as of old; grieved she was, but with her sorrow was a formality; by temperament she was one of those unfortunates who always look backward to the morning that has passed rather than forward to that which shall be.