tried yesterday, and with the glass your sight was as good
as mine, almost."

"Even so short a while makes a difference, now. You cannot
understand that, Janet; you will, some day."

"We will tell you," the girl repeated, "as soon as ever they come in
sight; perhaps before. We may see the smoke first between the trees,
you know."

"Ay," the old lady answered, and added, "There was no such thing in
those days." Her hand went out toward the field-glass again, and
rested, trembling a little, on the edge of the table. "I thought--
yesterday--that the trees had grown a good deal. They have closed
in, and the river is narrower; or perhaps it looks narrower, through
a glass."

The men at the far end of the veranda, who had been talking apart
while they scanned the upper bends of the river, lowered their voices
suddenly. They had heard a throbbing sound to the northward; either
the beat of a drum or the panting stroke of a steamboat's paddles.

All waited, with their eyes on the distant woods. By and by a film
of dark smoke floated up as through a crevice in the massed
tree-tops, lengthened, and spread itself in the sunlight.
The throbbing grew louder--the beat of a drum, slow and funereal,
with the clank of paddle-wheels filling its pauses. And now--hark!--
a band playing the Dead March!

The girl knelt and lifted the glass, ready focused. The failing
woman leaned forward, and with fingers that trembled on the tube,
directed it where the river swept broadly around the headland.

What did she see? At first an ugly steamboat nosing into view and
belching smoke from its long funnel; then a double line of soldiers
crowding the deck, and between their lines what seemed at first to be
a black mound with a scarlet bar across it. But the mound was the
plumed hearse of her husband, and the scarlet bar the striped flag of
the country for which he had died--his adopted country, long since
invited to her seat among the nations.

The men in the veranda had bared their heads. They heard a bell ring
on board the steamboat. Her paddles ceased to rotate, and after a
moment began to churn the river with reversed motion, holding the
boat against its current. The troops on her deck, standing with
reversed arms; the muffled drums; the half-masted flag; all saluted a
hero and the widow of a hero.

So, after forty-three years, Richard Montgomery returned to the wife
he had left with a promise that, come what might, she sho