But the flame of life burns quicker and fiercer in London than at Downside, for that same girl, coming back after only five years in London, was so changed and aged and altered that--though, to be sure, she came in the dusk and was muffled up in a big shawl--no one recognised her, or thought for a moment of pretty, coquettish, well-dressed Edith Robins, when the weary, shabby-looking woman passed them by. She had lingered a minute or two by the churchyard gate, though tramps, for such her worn-out boots and muddy skirts proclaimed her, do not, as a rule, care for such music as sounded out from the church door, where Mr Robins was consoling himself for the irritation of choir-practice by ten minutes' playing. It was soon over, and Jack Davis, still blower, and not much taller than he was five years before, charged out in the rebound from the tension of long blowing, and nearly knocked over the woman standing by the churchyard gate in the shadow of the yew-tree, and made the baby she held in her arms give a feeble cry. 'Now then, out of the way!' he shouted in that unnecessarily loud voice boys assume after church, perhaps to try if their lungs are still capable of producing such a noise after enforced silence. The woman made no answer, but after the boy had run off, went in and waited in the porch till the sound of turning keys announced that the organist was closing the organ and church for the night. But as his footsteps drew near on the stone pavement she started and trembled as if she had been afraid, and when he came out into the porch she shrank away into the shadow as if she wished to be unobserved. He might easily have passed her, for it was nearly dark from the yew-tree and the row of elms that shut out, the western sky, where the sunset was just dying away. His mind, too, was occupied with other things, and he was humming over the verse of a hymn the boys had been singing--'Far from my heavenly home.' There was no drilling into them the proper rendering of the last pathetic words-- O guide me through the desert here, And bring me home at last. He quite started when a hand was laid upon his arm, and a voice, changed indeed, and weak, but still the voice that in old days--not so very old either--was the one voice for him in all the world, said: 'Father!' I think just for one minute his impulse was to take her in his arms and forget the ingratitude and desertion and deceit, like the father in the parable whose heart went out to the poor prodigal while he was yet a long way off; but the next moment the cold, bitter, resentful feelings quenched the gentler impulse, and he drew away his arm from her detaining hold, and passed on along the flagged path as if he were unconscious of her presence, and this on the very threshold of His house, who so pitifully forgives the debts of His servants, forasmuch as they have not to pay. But he had not reached the churchyard gate before she was at his side again.