ith a patience that
surprised her friends.

Months passed, and yet the mystery was unsolved. The large reward
offered by Mr. Voss for the recovery of his son's remains kept hundreds
of fishermen and others who frequented the river banks and shores of
the bay leading down to the ocean on the alert. As the spring opened
and the ice began to give way and float, these men examined every
inlet, cove and bar where the tide in its ebb and flow might possibly
have left the body for which they were in search; and one day, late in
the month of March, they found it, three miles away from the city,
where it had drifted by the current.

The long-accepted theory of the young man's death was proved by this
recovery of his body. No violence was found upon it. The diamond pin
had not been taken from his shirt-bosom, nor the gold watch from his
pocket. On the dial of his watch the hands, stopping their movement as
the chill of the icy water struck the delicate machinery, had recorded
the hour of his death--ten minutes to one o'clock.

It was not possible, under the strain of such an affliction and the
wear of a suspense that no human heart was able to endure without waste
of life, for one in feeble health like Mrs. Voss to hold her own.
Friends read in her patient face and quiet mouth, and eyes that had a
far-away look, the signs of a coming change that could not be very far
off.

After the sad certainty came and the looking and longing and waiting
were over, after the solemn services of the church had been said and
the cast-off earthly garments of her precious boy hidden away from
sight for ever, the mother's hold upon life grew feebler every day. She
was slowly drifting out from the shores of time, and no hand was strong
enough to hold her back. A sweet patience smoothed away the lines of
suffering which months of sorrow and uncertainty had cut in her brow,
the grieving curves of her pale lips were softened by tender
submission, the far-off look was still in her eyes, but it was no
longer fixed and dreary. Her thought went away from herself to others.
The heavenly sphere into which she had come through submission to her
Father's will and a humble looking to God for help and comfort began to
pervade her soul and fill it with that divine self-forgetting which all
who come spiritually near to him must feel.

She could not go out and do strong and widely-felt work for humanity,
could not lift up the fallen, nor help the weak, nor vis