But the mother! She did not dread that day. Her eyes used to brighten when the bell began to ring from the old church steeple. Her eyes! how they mingled with every picture! They seemed to fill the night. What a sparkle they had, yet how they used to soften at his few hurried caresses. He was always too busy for kisses; there were the snares in the north woods to be looked after; the nest in the apple-tree to be inquired into; the skates to be ground before the river froze over; the nuts to be gathered and stored in that same old garret chamber under the eaves. But now how vividly her least look comes back to the tired man, from the glance of wistful sympathy with which she met his childish disappointments to the flash of joy that hailed his equally childish delights. And another scene there is in the embers to-night; a remembrance of later days when the mother with her love and yearning was laid low in the grave, and manhood had learned its first lessons of passion and ambition from the glance of younger eyes and the smile of riper lips. Not the picture of a woman, however; that was already present beside him, shining from its panel with an insistence that not even the putting out of the lights could quite quench or subdue, but of a child young, pure and beautiful, sitting by the river in the glow of a June sunshine, gazing at the hills of his boyhood’s home with a look on her face such as he had never before seen on that of child or woman. A simple picture with a simple villager’s daughter for its centre, but as he mused upon it to-night, the success and triumph of the last ten years faded from his sight like the ashes that fell at his feet, and he found himself questioning in vain as to what better thing he had met in all the walks of his busy life than that young child’s innocence and faith as they shone upon him that day from her soft uplifted eyes.