“Never--never in the world,” he insisted. “I am so glad you forgive it, if it is intrusiveness. But I am staying down here at my aunt’s; she has been very ill. And I have so longed to say just one word to you--to call you by telephone--or,--something. I would see your solitary light burning across the lake, so late, so late--you know we have been watchers here, too,--and I would think of you, shut in with your sorrow, and no human pity can comfort you. So I could only send my prayers for you. Did you feel my prayers?” They were very real to her in her simple faith, very important, necessarily efficacious. “No,” he said, honestly. But as her face fell he added: “Perhaps they will be answered.” “Oh, assuredly,” she cried, tremulously, and her sincerity touched him. “Whenever your light shines late from your east window remember that I am praying that you may have the grace to turn your thoughts joyfully to the blessed memories you have of your brother, and the happy hours that were in mercy vouchsafed to you, and what he was to you, and what you were to him, and what you will be to each other on the day of the great Reunion. So that you may have strength to take up your duties in life again, in usefulness and contentment--like the man you were born to be, and the man you are. Then shall my prayers be answered, and the memory of your brother will become a blessing, and not a blight.” There was some responsive chord in that manly heart of his vibrating strongly to this appeal. Only the next day, struggling with an averse distaste and wincing from the sights and sounds of the former routine, he went out to supervise the weighing of the cotton in the fields, now beginning to open with a fair promise. He felt strangely grateful for the hearty greetings of the laborers, and an humble appeal to right some little injustice only within his power made his hands seem strong, and renewed his sense of a duty in the world. The next day, collapsing on his resolution, it was difficult to force himself to take out his fine horse and drive as of yore to the neighboring town, attending a meeting of the planters of the vicinity, all agog, always, on the subject of the operations of the levee board.