gleam now that he had come into them; the dull hours went more swiftly, the sky seemed brighter; evening came full of sweet tones, mysterious lights, and peace and perfume; people passing by seemed strolling, too, in a golden beatitude. They, too, Esther fancied, surely must feel the sweetness and depth of the twilight. The morning came with a bright flash, not dawning with a great weight of pain and listlessness as before. In the hot blaze of the mid-day sun Geoffry would come into the shaded room where the women were sitting at work by the window.

It was, indeed, to him like a memory of old times, to be sitting with Esther at an open window, with the shadows of the orange-trees lying on the floor where the shade of the awning did not reach. Jack liked playing with the shadows, putting his little leg out into the sunshine, and pulling it back, to try and cheat the light and carry some away; but Prissa (her grown-up name was to be Priscilla) liked best sitting quietly on her mother's knee, and, as it were, staring at the stories she told her with great round eyes. The story broke off abruptly when Smith came in, and another tale began. It seemed like a dream to poor Geoffry to find himself sitting there, with Esther, at an open window, with the sounds and the sunshine without, sounds of horses at the water, of the water rushing, of voices calling to each other, of sudden bursts of bells from the steeples of Bagnères de Bigorre. It seemed to him almost as if all the years were not, and he was his old self again. Can you fancy what it was to him after his long waiting, long resignation, long hopelessness, to find himself suddenly in port, as it were, with his wish there before him and almost within his grasp. Death, indifference, distance, other men and women, years, forgetfulness, chance, and human frailty, had all been between them and divided them, and now all these things surmounted, like a miracle these two seemed to be brought together again, only divided by a remembrance.

Some things seem so familiar, so natural, that though they befall us only once or twice in a lifetime perhaps, yet while they last they seem almost eternal, and as if they had been and would be for ever. They suit us, and harmonize and form part of ourselves and of our nature, and so far in truth they are eternal if we ourselves are eternal, with our sympathy and hopes and faithful love.