Within Callista's dusk kitchen, the firelight set moving ruddy shine and shadow on the brown walls. Midway one of these she had hung up the banjo, having carried it home across her shoulders. Its sheepskin round showed a misty moon within the gleam of metal band where the blaze struck out a sparkling crescent to rim one side. It made no question now of "How many miles, how many years?" for the answer was come. Later Lance would take it down and string it afresh, and the little feet that kicked their pink heels against his knee, their fat toes curling ecstatically in the heat of the fire, would dance to its strumming. Even Callista would learn the delight of measuring her step by its music. But now it was mute. There was no need of its voice in the harmony that was here. And when Callista, in the pauses of her [398] homely task of dinner making, knelt beside the pair at the fire and encircled them both with her arms, Lance knew that he had at last brought home his own to his island. An island! It stretched away before the eye of his spirit, a continent, a world, a universe! The confines of that airy domain where he had dwelt alone and uncompanioned, were suddenly wide enough to take in all mankind, though they held just now only the trinity of home--father, mother, and child. End of Project Gutenberg's The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage, by Alice MacGowan