Suddenly the bell rang loudly and repeatedly, as if the new-comer was impatient of delay. Christie paused to listen. It was not Mr. Power’s ring, not his voice in the hall below, not his step that came leaping up the stairs, nor his hand that threw wide the door. She knew them all, and her heart stood still an instant; then she gathered up her strength, said low to herself, “Now it is coming,” and was ready for the truth, with a colorless face; eyes unnaturally bright and fixed; and one hand on her breast, as if to hold in check the rebellious heart that would throb so fast. It was David who came in with such impetuosity. Snow-flakes shone in his hair; the glow of the keen wind was on his cheek, a smile on his lips, and in his eyes an expression she had never seen before. Happiness, touched with the shadow of some past pain; doubt and desire; gratitude and love,—all seemed to meet and mingle in it; while, about the whole man, was the free and ardent air of one relieved from some heavy burden, released from some long captivity. “O David, what is it?” cried Christie, as he stood looking at her with this strange look. “News, Christie! such happy news I can’t find words to tell them,” he answered, coming nearer, but too absorbed in his own emotion to heed hers. She drew a long breath and pressed her hand a little heavier on her breast, as she said, with the ghost of a smile, more pathetic than the saddest tears: “I guess it, David.” “How?” he demanded, as if defrauded of a joy he had set his heart upon. “I met Kitty,—she told me nothing,—but her face betrayed what I have long suspected.” David laughed, such a glad yet scornful laugh, and, snatching a little miniature from his pocket, offered it, saying, with the new impetuosity that changed him so: “That is the daughter I have found for my mother. You know her,—you love her; and you will not be ashamed to welcome her, I think.” Christie took it; saw a faded, time-worn likeness of a young girl’s happy face; a face strangely familiar, yet, for a moment, she groped to find the name belonging to it. Then memory helped her; and she said, half incredulously, half joyfully: “Is it my Rachel?” “It is my Letty!” cried David, with an accent of such mingled love and sorrow, remorse and joy, that Christie seemed to hear in it the death-knell of her faith in him. The picture fell from the hands she put up, as if to ward off some heavy blow, and her voice was sharp with reproachful anguish, as she cried: “O David, David, any thing but that!” An instant he seemed bewildered, then the meaning of the grief in her face flashed on him, and his own grew white with indignant repudiation of the thought that daunted her; but he only said with the stern brevity of truth: “Letty is my sister.” “Forgive me,—how could I know? Oh, thank God! thank God!” and, dropping down upon a chair, Christie broke into a passion of the happiest tears she ever shed.