nt that
he drew back hesitating. But, suddenly aware of him, she sprang up
swiftly, with no sign of tears upon her face.

"Oh, come in, come in!" she said impatiently. "Why do you stand
there?"

She ran forward to meet him with hands hungrily outstretched, and
he put into them those trifles which were to her so infinitely
precious--a cigarette-case, a silver match-box, a pen-knife, a little
old prayer-book very worn at the edges, with all the gilt faded from
its leaves. She gathered them to her breast closely, passionately.
All but the prayer-book had been her gifts to the father she had
worshipped. With a wrung heart she called to mind the occasion upon
which each had been offered, his smile of kindly appreciation, the
old-world courtliness of his thanks. With loving hands she laid them
down one by one, lingering over each, seeing them through a blur of
tears. She was no longer conscious of Grange, as reverently, even
diffidently, she opened last of all the little shabby prayer-book that
her father had been wont to take with him on all his marches. She knew
that he had cherished it as her mother's gift.

It opened upon a scrap of white heather which marked the Service for
the Burial of the Dead. Her tears fell upon the faded sprig, and she
brushed her hand swiftly across her eyes, looking more closely as
certain words underlined caught her attention. Other words had been
written by her father's hand very minutely in the margin.

The passage underlined was ... "not to be sorry as men without hope,
for them that sleep ..." and in a moment she guessed that her father
had made that mark on the day of her mother's death. It was like a
message to her, the echo of a cry.

The words in the margin were so small that she had to carry them to
the light to read them. And then they flashed out at her as if
sprung suddenly to light on the white paper. There, in the beloved
handwriting, sure and indelible, she read it, and across the desert
of her heart, voiceless but insistent, there swept the hunger-cry of a
man's soul: OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.

It pulsed through her like an electric current, seeming to overwhelm
every other sensation, shutting her off as it were from the home-world
to which she had fled, how fruitlessly, for healing. Once more
skeleton fingers held hers, shifting to and fro, to and fro, slowly,
ceaselessly, flashing the deep rays that shone from ruby hearts hither
and thither. Once more--But she would not bear i