ty, she ought to show a little backwardness.

"_Abide with me! fast falls the eventide,
The darkness deepens. Lord, with me abide._"

She sang, as she always did, with her heart as well as her voice. The
song hushed the gay chatter in the room; it passed out to the group on
the veranda, and their conversation ceased; it floated through the open
windows and rang across the darkly luminous water of the pond. And
there it reached the ear of a man with whom only despair and loss had
been abiding, and who was fighting a losing battle with these dark
companions. The sound of the old hymn, that had been his children's
lullaby, arrested John McIntyre on the brink of self-destruction:

"Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day,
Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away,
Change and decay in all around I see,
O Thou, who changest not, abide with me!"

A trembling weakness seized him. He shrank back against the heap of
logs. He seemed to have no power against the imperative sweetness of
that voice. It called him away, it called him up. He clutched the
rough bark of a log, and stood listening till the song swept on to its
triumphant ending:

"_Heaven's morning breaks and earth's vain shadows flee,
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!_"

The last echo died away in the shadow of the willows. John McIntyre
stood a moment, dazed by the glimpse into the depths to which his
despair had brought him. He glanced down at the dark water and
shuddered, then staggered weakly to his old place at the mill door, and
sank in the sawdust. Something, not a prayer, but nearer it than
anything he had uttered for years, burst from him--the name of his
Maker, spoken unwittingly, in an abandon of weakness. "My God!" he
whispered shakingly. The strength of desperation which had driven him
on was gone, but his despair remained. And so he lay, spent and weak,
in utter blackness of soul, not knowing that the prayer of the song had
been answered, and that, though he knew Him not in the darkness, his
Father was abiding with him still.

CHAPTER X

THE SECRET OF THE BLUE SILK GOWN

O love, can the tree lure the summer bird
Again to the bough where it used to sing,
When never a throat in the autumn is heard,
And never the glint of a vagrant wing?
--ARTHUR STRINGER.

The autumn days came, and all the landscape within the range of Granny
Long's telescope turned golden with i