me, and
letting her mother know that a welcome awaited her in her old home.

He had not slept very much during the night, for his mind had been too
full of the change that was coming in his life, and of the difference
that the presence of Edith and little Zoe would make in the dull, old
house. Sad and worn and altered, was she! Ah! that would soon pass
away with kindness and care and happiness, and the cough that had
sounded so hollow and ominous should be nursed away, and Edith should
be a girl again, a girl as she ought to be yet by right of her years;
and those five years of suffering and estrangement should be altogether
forgotten as if they had never been.

He went into the bedroom next his, that had been Edith's--that was to
be Edith's again--and, looking round it, noticed with satisfaction that
Jane had kept it just as it had been in the old days; and he pushed the
bed a little to one side to make room for a cot to stand beside it, a
cot which he remembered in the night as having stood for years in the
lumber-room up in the roof, and which he now with much difficulty
dragged out from behind some heavy boxes, and fitted together, wishing
there had been time to give it a coat of paint, and yet glad, with a
tremulous sort of gladness, that there was not, seeing that it would be
wanted that very night.

And just then Jane Sands came up to call him to breakfast, and stood
looking from the cot to her master's dusty coat, with such a look of
delighted comprehension on her face, that the organist felt that no
words were needed to prepare her for what was going to happen.

'I thought,' he said, 'it had better be brought down.'

'Where shall it go?' she asked.

'In Miss----in the room next mine,' he said, 'and it will want a good
airing.'

'Shall I make up the bed too?' she asked.

'Yes, you may as well.'

'Oh, master,' she said, the tears shaking in her voice and shining in
her eyes; 'will they be wanted soon? Will they, maybe, be wanted
to-night?'

His own voice felt suspiciously shaky; his own eyes could not see the
old cot, nor Jane's beaming face quite plainly, so he only gave a gruff
assent and turned away.

'What a good, kind creature she is!' he thought. 'What a welcome she
will give Edith and Edith's little Zoe!'

During the morning he heard her up in the room sweeping and scrubbing,
as if for these five years it had been left a prey to dust and dirt;
and when he went out after dinner to give a