She returned to Sunnyside oppressed with a homesick longing for Patrick.  The two years which had elapsed since his death had blunted the edge of her sorrow—­as time inevitably must—­but she still missed the shrewd, kindly, worldly-wise old man unspeakably, and just now, thrown back upon herself in some indefinable way by Miles’s attitude, her whole heart cried out for that other who was gone.

She wondered if he knew how much she needed him.  She almost believed that he must know—­wherever he might be now, she felt that Patrick would never have forgotten the child of the woman whom, in this world, he had loved so long and faithfully.

With an instinctive craving for some tangible memory of him, she unlocked the leather case which held her mother’s miniature, together with the last letter which Patrick had ever written; and, unfolding the letter, began to read it once again.

Somehow, there seemed comfort in the very wording of it, in every little characteristic phrase that had been Patrick’s, in the familiar appellation, “Little old pal,” which he had kept for her alone.

All at once her fingers gripped the letter more tightly, her attentions riveted by a certain passage towards the end.

“. . .  And when love comes to you, never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift.  Don’t let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, or the tittle-tattle of other folks, and even if it seems that something unsurmountable lies between you and the fulfillment of love, go over it, or round it, or through it!  If it’s real love, your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way—­or to go over them.”

Had Patrick foreseen the exact circumstances in which his “little old pal” would one day find herself, he could not have written anything more strangely applicable.

Sara sat still, every nerve of her taut and strung.  She felt as though she had laid bare the whole of her trouble, revealed her inmost soul in all its anguished perplexity, to those shrewd blue eyes which had been wont to see so clearly through externals, piercing infallibly to the very heart of things.

Patrick had always possessed that supreme gift of being able to separate the grain from the chaff—­to distinguish unerringly between essentials and non-essentials, and now, in the quiet, wise counsel of an old letter, Sara found an answer to all the questionings that had made so bitter a thing of life.

It was almost as if some one had torn down a curtain from before her eyes, rent asunder a veil which had been distorting and obscuring the values of things.

Mountains!  There were mountains indeed betwixt her and Garth—­and there was no way round them or through them!  But now—­now she would go over them—­go straight ahead, unregarding of the mountains between, to where Garth and love awaited her.