but it did not leave blankness behind it.  There has come in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old—­the look of faith in immortal things.  She is not now the mother with the tenderness of this earth but the mother with the expectation of eternity.  Her eyes have followed him who has left her arms and gone into a distance.  Ever she follows him into that distance.  Your portrait, if you can paint it, will be the mother with the look of immortal things in her face.”

* * * * *

When she entered the room next morning, at the sight of her in mourning and so changed in every way, with one impulse they all rose to her.  She took no notice,—­perhaps it would have been unendurable to notice,—­but she stepped forward as usual, and climbed to the platform without faltering, and he posed her for the head and shoulders.  Then, to study the effect from different angles, he went behind the easels, passing from one to another.  As he returned, with the thought of giving her pleasure, he brought along with him one of the sketches of herself and held it out before her.

“Do you recognize it?” he asked.

She refused to look at first.  Then arousing herself from her indifference she glanced at it.  But when she beheld there what she had never seen—­how great had been her love of him; when she beheld there the light now gone out and realized that it meant the end of happy days with him, she shut her eyes quickly and jerked her head to one side with a motion for him to take the picture away.  But she had been brought too close to her sorrow and suddenly she bent over her hands like a snapped reed and the storm of her grief came upon her.

They started up to get to her.  They fought one another to get to her.  They crowded around the platform, and tried to hide her from one another’s eyes, and knelt down, and wound their arms about her, and sobbed with her; and then they lifted her and guided her behind the screens.

“Now, if you will allow them,” he said, when she came out with them, one of them having lent her a veil, “some of these young friends will go home with you.  And whenever you wish, whenever you feel like it, come back to us.  We shall be ready.  We shall be waiting.  We shall all be glad.”

On the heights the cathedral rises—­slowly, as the great houses of man’s Christian faith have always risen.

Years have drifted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting and the shaping of the stone goes on.  The snows of winters have drifted deep above its rough beginnings; the suns of many a spring have melted the snows away.  Well nigh a generation of human lives has already measured its brief span about the cornerstones.  Far-brought, many-tongued toilers, toiling on the