She dreamed that night a dream which, though it confirmed all this, tranquilized and comforted her.  In a vision her boy stood by her bedside and smiled upon her with his old loving smile.  He bent over and kissed her with his wonted tenderness; he laid his hand on her forehead with a soft pressure, and she felt the touch thrilling to her heart in sweet and tender impulses.

“It is all well with me,” he said; “I shall wait for you, mother.”

And then he bent over and kissed her again, the pressure of his lips bringing an unspeakable joy to her heart.  With this joy filling and pervading it, she awoke.  From that hour Mrs. Voss never doubted for a single moment that her son was dead, nor that he had come to her in a vision of the night.  As a Christian woman with whom faith was no mere ideal thing or vague uncertainty, she accepted her great affliction as within the sphere and permission of a good and wise Providence, and submitted herself to the sad dispensation with a patience that surprised her friends.

Months passed, and yet the mystery was unsolved.  The large reward offered by Mr. Voss for the recovery of his son’s remains kept hundreds of fishermen and others who frequented the river banks and shores of the bay leading down to the ocean on the alert.  As the spring opened and the ice began to give way and float, these men examined every inlet, cove and bar where the tide in its ebb and flow might possibly have left the body for which they were in search; and one day, late in the month of March, they found it, three miles away from the city, where it had drifted by the current.

The long-accepted theory of the young man’s death was proved by this recovery of his body.  No violence was found upon it.  The diamond pin had not been taken from his shirt-bosom, nor the gold watch from his pocket.  On the dial of his watch the hands, stopping their movement as the chill of the icy water struck the delicate machinery, had recorded the hour of his death—­ten minutes to one o’clock.

It was not possible, under the strain of such an affliction and the wear of a suspense that no human heart was able to endure without waste of life, for one in feeble health like Mrs. Voss to hold her own.  Friends read in her patient face and quiet mouth, and eyes that had a far-away look, the signs of a coming change that could not be very far off.

After the sad certainty came and the looking and longing and waiting were over, after the solemn services of the church had been said and the cast-off earthly garments of her precious boy hidden away from sight for ever, the mother’s hold upon life grew feebler every day.  She was slowly drifting out from the shores of time, and no hand was strong enough to hold her back.  A sweet patience smoothed away the lines of suffering which months of sorrow and uncertainty had cut in her brow, the grieving curves of her pale lips were softened by tender submission, the far-off look was still in her eyes, but it was no longer fixed and dreary.  Her thought went away from herself to others.  The heavenly sphere into which she had come through submission to her Father’s will and a humble looking to God for help and comfort began to pervade her soul and fill it with that divine self-forgetting which all who come spiritually near to him must feel.