band, and General Armour put his hand on hers gently and said:

"Lali, without your permission I have read this other letter."

She did not appear curious. She was thinking still of her father's
letter to her. She nodded abstractedly. "Lali," he continued, "this says
that your father wished that letter to be written to you just as he said
it at the Fort, on the day of the Feast of the Yellow Swan. He stood
up--the factor writes so here--and said that he had been thinking much
for years, and that the time had come when he must speak to his daughter
over the seas--"

General Armour paused. Lali inclined her head, smiled wistfully, and
held up the letter for him to see. The general continued:

"So he spoke as has been written to you, and then they had the Feast of
the Yellow Swan, and that night--" He paused again, but presently,
his voice a little husky, he went on: "That night he set out on a long
journey,"--he lifted the letter and looked at it, then met the serious
eyes of his daughter-in-law, "on a long journey to the Hills of the
Mighty Men; and, my dear, he never came back; for, as he said, there was
peace in the White Valley, and he would rest till the world should come
to its Spring again, and the noise of its coming should be in his ears.
Those, Lali, are his very words."

His hand closed on hers, he reached out and took the other hand, from
which the paper fluttered, and clasped both tight in his own firm grasp.

"My daughter," he said, "you have another father." With a low cry,
like that of a fawn struck in the throat, she slid forward on her knees
beside him, and buried her face on his arm. She understood. Her father
was dead. Mrs. Armour came forward, and, kneeling also, drew the dark
head to her bosom. Then that flood came which sweeps away the rust that
gathers in the eyes and breaks through the closed dikes of the heart.

Hours after, when she had fallen into a deep sleep, General Armour and
his wife met outside her bedroom door.

"I shall not leave her," Mrs. Armour said. "Send for Frank. His time has
almost come."

But it would not have come so soon had not something else occurred. The
day that he came back from Scotland he entered his wife's room, prepared
for a change in her, yet he did not find so much to make him happy as he
had hoped. She received him with a gentleness which touched him, she let
her hand rest in his, she seemed glad to have him with her. All bars had
been cast down between