ddy as yoh."

"I am very glad he has come back, Lois," said Mrs. Howth, gravely.

At every place where Lois had been that day she had told her bit of
good news, and at every place it had been met with the same kindly
smile and "I'm glad he's back, Lois."

Yet Joe Yare, fresh from two years in the penitentiary, was not exactly
the person whom society usually welcomes with open arms. Lois had a
vague suspicion of this, perhaps; for, as she hobbled along the path,
she added to her own assurance of his "stiddiness" earnest explanations
to Joel of how he had a place in the Croft Street woollen-mills, and
how Dr. Knowles had said he was as ready a stoker as any in the
furnace-rooms.

The sound of her weak, eager voice was silent presently, and nothing
broke the solitary cold of the night.

CHAPTER III.

The morning, when it came long after, came quiet and cool,--the warm
red dawn helplessly smothered under great waves of gray cloud.
Margret, looking out into the thick fog, lay down wearily again,
closing her eyes. What was the day to her?

Very slowly the night was driven back. An hour after, when she lifted
her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch,
like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting,
slow-heaving mass of ashy damp. Off in the east a stifled red film
groped through. It was another day coming; she might as well get up,
and live the rest of her life out;--what else had she to do?

Whatever this night had been to the girl, it left one thought sharp,
alive, in the exhausted quiet of her brain: a cowardly dread of the
trial of the day, when she would see him again. Was the old struggle
of years before coming back? Was it all to go over again? She was
worn out. She had been quiet in these two years: what had gone before
she never looked back upon; but it made her thankful for even this
stupid quiet. And now, when she had planned her life, busy, useful,
contented, why need God have sent the old thought to taunt her? A
wild, sickening sense of what might have been struggled up: she thrust
it down,--she had kept it down all night; the old pain should not come
back,--it should not. She did not think of the love she had given up
as a dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be the
quick seed of her soul. She cried for it even now, with all the fierce
strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through it she came
nearest to God