Love shrieked aloud in pain, and flinging aside the cruel hand of Fate, threw his arms about the shrinking girl. They stood in the misty gloom together, his brilliant form regained its strength. Grief lifted her brimming eyes to his and caught their power. [Illustration] A great wave of tenderness broke over the mournful face of Fate; her calm glance rested prophetically on the two figures as she addressed them for the last time. "But her love of thee shall endure until the Lilies of Grief are lost in the Roses of Love; for Love shall be king of Grief, and of Time, and of Eternity." [Illustration: UNTIL THE LILIES OF GRIEF ARE LOST IN THE ROSES OF LOVE] The Flower that reached the Sun-lands [Illustration: The Flower that reached the Sun-lands] "No star is ever lost we once have seen We always may be what we might have been" Adelaide Procter I. Though only a miserable little waif, born in sorrow and nurtured in poverty, George Ermen had resolved to be a great man. He earned six shillings a week at sorting rags and paper, adding frequently to this a smaller sum gained by cleaning pots at a public-house. It was a miserable pittance. He and his mother could hardly be said to live upon it, they only existed; and they found this still more difficult when George's father, a lazy, ne'er-do-well, came to visit them. The boy and his mother dwelt in a garret in Paradise Court. It was a bare, miserable room, its only furniture an old iron bedstead, a rickety table, and two chairs. Opening out of the attic was a tiny chamber with a mattress in one corner, on which George slept. He had no bed-clothes, and was in the habit of covering himself with papers during the chill winter nights. On the wall hung a small plaster crucifix. A sprig of box was thrust through the ring by which the cross was suspended. The window looked out upon a wilderness of chimneys and grimy tenement houses. It seemed to George that God had been very good to him, although he was poor and ragged and half starved, for besides his old mother, whom he loved above everything, he had three good friends--Father Francis, the Roman Catholic priest; Miss Brand, who was devoting both time and money to the suffering poor in the district; and Maggie Reed, his little sweetheart, who was as poverty-stricken and as tattered as himself.