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 among the massive chords, the profound melancholy, the blind groping of any Fifth Symphony or piercing Stabat Mater, she answered it, singing Elijah’s hymn of rest; and as she sang, there grew in her voice a strength, a sweetness, that satisfied the very soul.  When the nine-o’clock bell rang in from the village through the winter night’s crystal clearness, little Jane would lightly nudge her mother and steal away to bed; and in the ruddy twilight of the felling fire the two talked softly, talked,—­but never of that dark thing lying most deeply in the heart of either.  Perhaps, by-and-by, when the thrilling wound should be only a scar, if ever that time should come, the one would be able to speak, the other to hear.