ll her life she had never seen so sweet
a character, so sensitive a mind--a mind whose sorrow was imagination.
And therein the little lady showed herself a person of wisdom. For
none of them had yet reckoned with that one great element in Lali's
character--that thing which is the birthright of all who own the North
for a mother, the awe of imagination, the awe and the pain, which in
its finest expression comes near, very near, to the supernatural. Lali's
mind was all pictures; she never thought of things in words, she saw
them; and everything in her life arrayed itself in a scene before her,
made vivid by her sensitive soul, so much more sensitive now with health
failing, the spirit wearing out the body. There was her malady--the sick
heart and mind.

A new sickness wore upon her. It had not touched her from the day she
left the North until she sang "The Chase of the Yellow Swan" that first
evening after Frank's return. Ever since then her father was much in her
mind--the memory of her childhood, and its sweet, inspiring friendship
with Nature. All the roughness and coarseness of the life was refined
in her memory by the exquisite atmosphere of the North, the good sweet
earth, the strong bracing wind, the camaraderie of trees and streams
and grass and animals. And in it all stood her father, whom she had left
alone, in that interminable interval between the old life and the new.

Had she done right? She had cut him off, as if he had never been--her
people, her country also; and for what? For this--for this sinking
sense, this failing body, this wear and tear of mind and heart, this
constant study to be possible where she had once been declared by the
world to be impossible.

One night she lay sleeping after a rather feverish day, when it was
thought best to keep the child from her. Suddenly she waked, and sat up.
Looking straight before her, she said:

"I will arise, and will go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father,
I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to
be called Thy son."

She said nothing more than this, and presently lay back, with eyes wide
open, gazing before her. Like this she lay all night long, a strange,
aching look in her face. There had come upon her the sudden impulse to
leave it all, and go back to her father. But the child--that gave her
pause. Towards morning she fell asleep, and slept far on into the day, a
thing that had not occurred for a long time.

At no