thout a sign from the heavens,
she became more positive and more constant in these assurances. As the
evening drew on, they would walk out along the unsown fields, now grown
rankly to weeds, to where the valley fell away from their feet to the
west. There they could look over line after line of hills, each a little
dimmer as it lay farther into the blue through which they saw it, from
the bold rim of the nearest shaggy-sided hill to the farthest feathery
profile all but lost in the haze. Day after day they sat together here
and waited for the sign,--for the going down of the sun upon a night
when there should be no darkness; when the light should stay until the
sun came back over the eastern verge; when the trumpet should wind
through the hills, and when the little man's perplexities, if not his
punishment, should be at an end.

And always when the dusk came she would try to cheer him to new hope for
the next night, counting the months that remained in the year, the
little time within which the great white day _must_ be. Then they would
go back through the soft light of the afterglow, he with his bent
shoulders and fallen face, shrunk and burned out, except for the eyes,
and she in the first buoyant flush of her womanhood, free and strong and
vital, a thing of warmth and colour and luring curve, restraining her
quick young step to his, as she suppressed now a world of strange new
fancies to his soberer way of thought. When they reached home again, her
words always were: "Never mind, Daddy--it must come soon--there's only
a little time left in the year."

It was on these occasions that he knew she was now the stronger, that he
was leaning on her, had, in fact, long made her his support--fearfully,
lest she be snatched away. And he knew at last that another change had
come with her years; that she no longer confided in him unreservedly, as
the little child had. He knew there were things now she could not give
him. She communed with herself, and her silences had come between them.
She looked past him at unseen forms, and listened as if for echoes that
she alone could hear, waiting and wanting, knowing not her wants--yet
driven to aloofness by them from the little bent man of sorrows, whose
whole life she had now become.

His hope lasted hardly until the year ended. Before the time was over,
there had crept into his mind a conviction that the Son of Man would not
come; that the Lord's favour had been withdrawn from Israel