ather and I were among them. We had fancied ourselves true
believers for years, but Jacob Cochrane unstopped our ears so that we
could hear the truths revealed to him by the Almighty!--It was all so
simple and easy at the beginning, but it grew hard and grievous
afterward; hard to keep the path, I mean. I never quite knew whether God
was angry with me for backsliding at the end, but I could not always
accept the revelations that Elder Cochrane and your father had!"

Lois Boynton's hands were now quietly folded over the knitting that lay
forgotten in her lap, but her low, thrilling voice had a note in it that
did not belong wholly to earth.

There was a long silence; one of many long silences at the Boynton
fireside, broken only by the ticking of the clock, the purring of the
cat, and the clicking of Mrs. Boynton's needles, as, her paroxysm of
reminiscence over, she knitted ceaselessly, with her eyes on the window
or the door.

"It's about time for Rod to be coming back, isn't it?" asked Ivory.

"He ought to be here soon, but perhaps he is gone for good; it may be
that he thinks he has made us a long enough visit. I don't know whether
your father will like the boy when he comes home. He never did fancy
company in the house."

Ivory looked up in astonishment from his Greek grammar. This was an
entirely new turn of his mother's mind. Often when she was more than
usually confused he would try to clear the cobwebs from her brain by
gently questioning her until she brought herself back to a clearer
understanding of her own thought. Thus far her vagaries had never made
her unjust to any human creature; she was uniformly sweet and gentle in
speech and demeanor.

"Why do you talk of Rod's visiting us when he is one of the family?"
Ivory asked quietly.

"Is he one of the family? I didn't know it," replied his mother
absently.

"Look at me, mother, straight in the eye; that's right: now listen,
dear, to what I say."

Mrs. Boynton's hair that had been in her youth like an aureole of
corn-silk was now a strange yellow-white, and her blue eyes looked out
from her pale face with a helpless appeal.

"You and I were living alone here after father went away," Ivory began.
"I was a little boy, you know. You and father had saved something, there
was the farm, you worked like a slave, I helped, and we lived, somehow,
do you remember?"

"I do, indeed! It was cold and the neighbors were cruel. Jacob Cochrane
had gone away and h