be a hard trial. But we must receive
him--if he comes."

"If he comes?" cried Esther, evidently alarmed; "there's no doubt of
that, is there, since he has written?"

"My dear, when you know your uncle you will understand that there is
always a doubt. He is very irregular and uncertain in all his ways.
He may change his mind or be turned aside. No one can tell. But go to
your tasks now, my children, and to bed early. I have some work to do
in my study."

Each of them kissed him good-night, and he watched them out of the
room with a look of tender sternness in his lined and rugged face,
anxious, troubled, and ready to give his life to safeguard them from
the invisible arrows of sin. Then he went into his long, narrow
book-room, but not to work.

Up and down the worn and dingy carpet, between the walls lined with
dull grey and brown and black books, he paced with heavy feet. The
weight of a dreadful responsibility pressed upon him, the anguish of a
spiritual conflict tore his heart. His old affection for his brother
seemed to revive and leap up within him, like a flame from smothered
embers when the logs are broken open. The memory of their young
comradeship and joys together grew bright and warm. He longed to see
Abel's face once more.

Then came other memories, dark and cold, crowding in upon him with
evil faces to chill and choke his love. The storm of rebellion that
led to the parting, the wild and reckless life in the far country, the
gambling, the drinking, the fighting, the things that he knew and the
things that he guessed--and then, the ways of Abel when he returned,
at times, in the earlier years, with his pockets full of money to
spend it in the worst company and with a high-handed indifference to
all restraint, yet always with a personal charm of generosity and
good-will that drew people to him and gave him a strange power over
them--and then, Abel's final refusal to listen any more to the
pleadings of the true faith, his good-humoured obstinacy in unbelief,
his definite choice of the world as his portion, and after that the
long silence and the growing rumours of his wealth, his extravagance,
his devotion, if not to the lust of the flesh, at least to the lust of
the eyes and the pride of life--all these thoughts and pictures rushed
upon Nathaniel North and overwhelmed him with painful terror and
foreboding. They seemed to loom above him and his children like black
clouds charged with hidden disaster. T