st then. I
thought only of Mother, of her devotion and of how little I had done to
deserve it. So this was the end: a narrow grave, a rending grief and the
haunting spectre of reproach.

I saw my Mother sitting at that window that faced the west, her hands
meekly folded on her lap, her eyes wistfully gazing over the grey sea. I
knew there was never a day of her life when she did not sit thus and
think of me. I could guess at the heartache that gentle face would not
betray, the longing those tender lips would not speak, the grief those
sweet eyes studied to conceal. As, sitting there in the strange clouded
sunset of my native land, she let her knitting drop on her lap, I knew
she prayed for me. Oh, Mother! Mother!

My sobs were choking me, and Berna was holding my hand very tightly. Yet
in a little I grew calmer.

"Berna," I said, "I've only got you now, only you, little girl. So you
must love me, you mustn't leave me."

"I'll never leave you--if you want me to stay."

"God bless you, dear. I can't tell you the comfort you are to me. I'll
try to be quiet now."

I will always remember those days as I grew slowly well again. The cot
in which I lay stood in the sitting-room of the cabin, and from the
window I could overlook the city. Snow had fallen, the days were diamond
bright, and the smoke ascended sharply in the glittering air. The little
room was papered with a design of wild roses that minded me of the
Whitehorse Rapids. On the walls were some little framed pictures; the
floor was carpeted in dull brown, and a little heater gave out a
pleasant warmth. Through a doorway draped with a curtain I could see her
busy in her little kitchen.

She left me much alone, alone with my thoughts. Often when all was quiet
I knew she was sitting there beyond the curtain, sitting thinking, just
as I was thinking. Quiet was the keynote of our life, quiet and
sunshine. That little cabin might have been a hundred miles from the
gold-born city, it was so quiet. Here drifted no echo of its abandoned
gaiety, its glory of demoralisation. How sweet she looked in her
spotless home attire, her neat waist, her white apron with bib and
sleeves, her general air of a little housewife. And never was there so
devoted a nurse.

Sometimes she would read to me from one of the few books I had taken
everywhere on my travels, a page or two from my beloved Stevenson, a
poem from my great-hearted Henley, a luminous passage from my Thoreau.
How tho