e of tears.

Lynn's violin was silent now, and softly, from the back of the house,
the girl's full contralto swelled into a song.

"The hours I spent with thee, Dear Heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me;
I count them over, every one apart--
My rosary! My rosary!"

Iris sang because she was happy, but, none the less, the deep, vibrant
voice had an undertone of sadness--a world-old sorrow which, by right
of inheritance, was hers.

Margaret's thoughts went back to her own girlhood, when she was no older
than the unseen singer. Love's cup had been at her lips, then, and had
been dashed away by a relentless hand.

"O memories that bless and burn!
O barren pain and bitter loss!
I kiss each bead and strive at last to learn
To kiss the cross--Sweetheart! To kiss the cross!"

"'To kiss the cross,'" muttered Margaret, then the tears came in a
blinding flood. "Mother! Mother!" she sobbed. "How could you!"

Insensibly, something was changed, and, for the first time, the woman
who had gone to her grave unforgiven, seemed not entirely beyond the
reach of pardon.

IX

Rosemary and Mignonette

"Sweet Lady of my Dreams, it cannot be that you are displeased. If you
were, I should know, but do not ask me how!

"Day by day, my eyes long for the sight of you; night by night my heart
remembers you, for that inner vision does not vanish with the sun. You
have unconsciously given me a priceless gift, for wherever I may go, I
take you with me--all the grace of you, all the beauty, and all the
softness. I have only to close my eyes and then I see.

"But do not think I keep your image always before me, for it is not so.
In the work-a-day world, you have no place. You belong, rather, to those
fair lands of fancy which lie just beyond the borders of this world and
are, or so I think, very near the gleaming gates of Heaven.

"I am not always at work, but sometimes, even when I am, you come
tripping before my eyes, so dainty, so wholly exquisite, that I forget
what I am doing, and then I must put you aside. But when the day is
done, and the light of it shows only through the pinholes pricked in the
curtain of night, then I can think of you, as radiant, as beautiful, and
as far above me as those very stars.

"All unknowingly, you are the light of my day. Whatever darkness might
surround me, your eyes would make it noon. However steep and thorny my
path, your hand in mine wou