it all was! The gold of that
sunset--I shall never wholly forget it, I think--was everywhere. It
glittered among the tree-tops, gilded the hill-crests, changed the
eastern horizon into a molten sea of warmest gold and colour; and----"

"Transfigured Rose, eh," he broke in, with a smile.

She laughed merrily as she said: "I am afraid I was forgetting myself,
talking so much description!"

A shadow passed over her face, as she went on:

"How quickly everything was to be changed, though! Grandmother's voice
called me from inside, Come, Rose, my child, and we will give God our
evening chant!

"I am afraid I sighed, as I turned from watching all that sunset
loveliness. It was not that I disliked our evening devotions, but
somehow felt that evening--as I have often done, in fact--that I would
fain worship God with all His evening miracle before my eyes, and would
fain then have lingered on in the glorious after-glow, though that
after-glow lasted all too short a time.

"I turned into the house, but I did not close the door, for it would
have seemed like sacrilege to have shut out all that glory. I took my
place by grandmother's side, with my hands folded across my breast, as,
together, we chanted 'Our Father who art in Heaven! Hallowed be Thy
name.'

"How it all remains with me, and ever will, all the little items of
that last night of dear grandma's life! I can seem to hear her voice
even now, she was very old, and it quavered and quivered like one of
our hill-country dulcimers!

"Our chant over, grandmother prayed, she prayed extra long that night
and our quick night had come down before she had finished. I lit a
little lamp, and we went to bed. Then----"

A shudder passed through her beautiful, reclining frame, as she
continued, and her voice had a new note in it, a note of pain:

"It was about midnight. The whole country slept. There were sixteen
small houses in our little village. They all huddled close together,
(for once there had been a wall enclosing them) suddenly there was a
sound of gun-fire. I leaped from my bed--Ah, me! I cannot describe
it. In half-an-hour the awful tragedy was completed. Every old man
and woman was killed, slain with a sword, or hacked to death, or
speared. Babies, and little children were brained against the walls of
the houses; strong men--fathers, lovers, sons--had been murdered with
every wantonness of savagery conceivable. The only persons spared had
been t