There he recovered bodily strength, but it was long before his mind returned to him, and meantime he had strange delusions. Something, perhaps, in the place of their retreat brought ghosts of the past out of a world of shadows, for he thought he was a boy again and Helena was his mother, who was thirty years dead and buried in the little churchyard lower down the stream, where the Rotha was deep and flowed with a solemn hush. Helena played up to his pathetic delusion, took the tender endearments that were meant for the grandmother she had never known, and as his young days came to the surface with the beautiful persistence of old memories ha the human mind, she fell in with them as if they had been her own. Thus on Sunday morning, when the bells rang, she would walk with him to church, holding his hand in her hand as if she were the mother and he the child. It was very sweet to look upon, for, in the sleep of the General’s brain, he was very happy, and only to those who saw that the brave girl, with her eyes of light and her lips of dew, was giving away her youth to her old father, was it charged with feeling too deep for tears. But at length the stricken man came out of the twilight land, and his dream faded away. Helena had to play their little American organ every evening that he might sing a hymn to it, for that was what his mother had always done, when she was putting her boy to bed and thinking, like a soldier’s wife, of his father who was away at the wars. It was always the same hymn, and one breathless evening, when the sun had gone down and the vale was still, they had come to— "Hide me, O my Saviour, hide, Till the storms of life be past"— and then his voice stopped suddenly, and he shaded his eyes as if something were blinding them. At that moment the past, which had been dead so long, seemed to rise from its grave, with all its mournful incidents—his wife and his shattered home—and Helena was not his mother but his daughter, and he was not a happy boy but an old soldier, with a broken life behind him. Seeing by the look in his eyes that he was coming to himself, Helena tried to comfort him, and when he gasped, "Who is it?" she answered in a voice she tried to render cheerful, "It is I. It is Helena. Don’t you know me, Father?" And then the years rolled back upon him like a flood, and he sobbed on her shoulder. The awakening had been painful, but it was not all pain. If he had lost a wife he had gained a daughter, and she was the strongest, staunchest creature in the world. For her sake he must begin again. Having had so much shadow in her young life, she must now have sunshine. Thus Helena became her father’s idol, the one thing on earth to him, and he was more to her than a father usually is to a daughter, because she had seen him in his weakness and mothered him back to strength.