ivined
her purpose, and hurried after her to join in the task. Ray found
himself alone in his corner; he shivered. In spite of all the weeks of
solitude, a sudden chill seized him; he gathered up his crutches, and
stalked on them to the table where little Jane was yet finding something
to do. She brought him a chair, and for a minute or two he watched her;
then he was only staring vacantly at his hands, as they lay before him
on the table.

If Janet was a busy soul, she was just as certainly a busybody. She had
the loving and innocent habit of making herself a member of every one's
equation. Just now she ached inwardly, when looking at Ray, and it was
impossible for her not to try and help him.

"Ray, dear," said she, leaving her work and standing before him, "I
think you ought to smile now. Vivia has forgiven you. Take it as an
earnest that God forgives you, too."

"I haven't sinned against God," said Ray. "I don't know who I sinned
against. I killed my brother."

And his face fell forward on his hands and wet them with jets of
scalding tears. Full of awe and misery, little Jane dropped upon her
knees beside him, and, clasping his hands in hers, said to herself some
silent prayer.

* * * * *

After that placid-ending Christmas, after that first prayer, those first
tears, after Vivia's music at nightfall, Ray was another creature. He no
longer shut himself up in his room, but was down and about with little
Jane at peep of day. Indeed, he had now a horror of being alone,
following Janet from morn till eve, like a shadow, and stooping forward,
when the dark began to gather, with great, silent tears rolling over his
face, unless she came and took the cricket at his foot, slipping her
warm hand into his, and helping him to himself with the unspoken
sympathy. But it was a horror which nothing wholly lulled to sleep at
last but Vivia's singing. Every night, for an hour or more, Vivia
wrought the music's spell about him, while he lay back in his chair, and
little Jane retreated across the hearth, not daring to intrude on such a
season. They were seldom purely sad things that she played: sometimes
the melody murmured its _cantabile_ like a summer brook into which
moonbeams bent, flowing along the lowland, breaking only in sprays of
tune, and seeming to paint in its bosom the sleeping shadows of the fair
field-flowers; and if ever the gentle strain lost its way, and found
itself wandering a