It was a bitter disappointment, but she roused herself even then to smile, and tell him yes, cheerfully.  You call it a trifle, nothing?  It may be; yet I think the angels looking down had tears in their eyes, when they saw the last trial of the unselfish, solitary heart, and kept for her a different crown from his who conquers a city.

The fire-light grew warmer and redder; her eyes followed it, as if all that had been bright and kindly in her life were coming back in it.  She put her hand on her father, trying vainly to smooth his gray hair.  The old man’s heart smote him for something, for his sobs grew louder, and he left her a moment; then she saw them all, faces very dear to her even then.  She laughed and nodded to them all in the old childish way; then her lips moved.  “It’s come right!” she tried to say; but the weak voice would never speak again on earth.

“It’s the turn o’ the night,” said Mrs. Polston, solemnly; “lift her head; the Old Year’s goin’ out.”

Margaret lifted her head, and held it on her breast.  She could hear cries and sobs; the faces, white now, and wet, pressed nearer, yet fading slowly:  it was the Old Year going out, the worn-out year of her life.  Holmes opened the window:  the cold night-wind rushed in, bearing with it snatches of broken harmony:  some idle musician down in the city, playing fragments of some old, sweet air, heavy with love and regret.  It may have been chance:  yet let us think it was not chance; let us believe that He who had made the world warm and happy for her chose that this best voice of all should bid her goodbye at the last.

So the Old Year went out.  The dull eyes, loving to the end, wandered vaguely as the sounds died away, as if losing something,—­losing all, suddenly.  She sighed as the clock struck, and then a strange calm, unknown before, stole over her face; her eyes flashed open with a living joy.  Margaret stooped to close them, kissing the cold lids; and Tiger, who had climbed upon the bed, whined and crept down.

“It is the New Year,” said Holmes, bending his head.

The cripple was dead; but Lois, free, loving, and beloved, trembled from her prison to her Master’s side in the To-Morrow.

I can show you her grave out there in the hills,—­a short, stunted grave, like a child’s.  No one goes there, although there are many firesides where they speak of “Lois” softly, as of something holy and dear:  but they think of her always as gone home; even old Yare looks up, when he talks of “my girl.”  Yet, knowing that nothing in God’s just universe is lost, or fails to meet the late fulfilment of its hope, I like to think of her poor body lying there:  I like to believe that the great mother was glad to receive the form that want and crime of men had thwarted,—­took her uncouth child home again, that had been so cruelly wronged,—­folded it in her warm bosom with tender, palpitating love.

It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out limbs, the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept:  crumbled into fresh atoms, woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when God smiled permission through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild ecstasy of the true beauty that she loved so well.  In no questioning, sad pallor of sombre leaves or gray lichens:  throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in lilies, white, exultant in a chordant life!