The merry voices were hushed for a moment, and the children looked in awed silence into the little room, as if it had been a shrine.

After they had gazed long and silently, and their mother went to fasten the window again, she said, “Children, we will come here and read God’s Word on Sunday afternoons, as the little company you know about used to do long ago; and I hope you will all listen to the Good Shepherd’s voice, and follow it as Geordie did;” and presently the children trooped quietly away along the dark vaulted passages.

There was no faithful Margery now to be trusted with everything, and able to put things straight in the twinkling of an eye, as her young mistress used to declare she alone was capable of doing, so Mrs. Foster had some unpacking and arranging preliminaries to superintend before she could join her eager little party out of doors.  But when tea was over, and the sun had begun to scatter its orange and crimson tints over the Kirklands valley, Grace thought she would like to take a stroll among some familiar places before the darkness came.

After lingering on the old terrace for a little, she gathered her boys and girls round her, and said she was going to take them across the park.  She wanted to visit a place she remembered well, a pleasant angle of a rising glade of birches, where she once stood mourning over the traces of an uprooted cottage.  But Grace knew that another home had grown on the ruins of the former dwelling, and to it she bent her steps now, for there was one of its inmates whom she longed to see.  There was something of the mingled feeling of interest and romance with which her children wore viewing these now yet familiar scenes, in Grace’s desire to look on a face she had not seen for many years.  Its image would rise before her, chubby, smiling, and childlike, as of old; and then she remembered the evening when she had first seen it tear-stained and sad, as she crossed this path with the little fat hand in hers, as her own Grace’s was now.

But Joan had not shed many tears since then.  There was no happier home in all the valley than the white cottage, over which the birch-trees lovingly stretched their delicate fringes, her husband, the village carrier, used to think when he came within sight of it, after his day’s journey was over, his parcels all delivered, and his horses “suppered” for the night.  Generally his bright-looking wife was hovering near the door, waiting his coming with a little group round her as merry as the one that was now making the woods of Kirklands ring with their light-hearted laughter.

Grace had not told the children that she meant to take them to see little Jean that evening.  She wanted first to go alone to the cottage and see her quietly there, for she had many things to hear and ask.  Still, Grace had not been altogether a stranger to the home life there.  Sometimes a letter, written and addressed with laborious carefulness, had followed her to remote foreign stations, and brought pleasant memories of dewy heather and fragrant birches as she read it among waving oleanders and palms.  During all those years Grace had watched over Jean’s welfare, and many things in her pretty home told of her thoughtful remembrance of Geordie’s sister.