ing look over the wee,
peaceful, sleeping faces there, and they all stood, for a minute,
surveying the goodly fullness of small delights stored up and waiting
for the morrow--how she turned suddenly, and stretched her hands out
toward the kind friends who had helped and sympathized in all, and said,
with a quick overflow of feeling, that could find only the old words
wherein to utter herself:

"Such a time as this! Such a beautiful time! And to think that I should
be in it!"

Miss Henderson's will was fulfilled.

A happy, young life had gathered again about the ancient hearthstone
that had seen two hundred years of human change.

The Old House, wherefrom the last of a long line had passed on into the
Everlasting Mansions, had become God's heritage.

Nurse Sampson spent her Christmas with the Gartneys.

They must have her again, they told her, at parting, for the wedding;
which would be in May.

"I may be a thousand miles off, by that time. But I shall think of you,
all the same, wherever I am. My work is coming. I feel it. There's a
smell of blood and death in the air; and all the strong hearts and
hands'll be wanted. You'll see it."

And with that, she was gone.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE WEDDING JOURNEY.

"The tree
Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched
By its own fallen leaves; and man is made,
In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes
And things that seem to perish."

"A stream always among woods or in the sunshine is pleasant to all
and happy in itself. Another, forced through rocks, and choked with
sand, under ground, cold, dark, comes up able to heal the
world."--FROM "SEED GRAIN."

"Shall we plan a wedding journey, Faith?"

It was one evening in April that Mr. Armstrong said this. The day for
the marriage had been fixed for the first week in May.

Faith had something of the bird nature about her. Always, at this moment
of the year, a restlessness, akin to that which prompts the flitting of
winged things that track the sunshine and the creeping greenness that
goes up the latitudes, had used to seize her, inwardly. Something that
came with the swelling of tender buds, and the springing of bright
blades, and the first music born from winter silence, had prompted her
with the whisper: "Abroad! abroad! Out into the beautiful earth!"

It had been one of her unsatisfied longings. She had thought, what a joy
it would be if she could have said, frankly, "Fathe