The party returned home laden with flowers, with just weariness enough to enjoy their rest.  The children were put to bed, after a good supper, and the family enjoyed themselves with music and conversation, each feeling differently related to each other, as we ever do, when some fresh life is infused into the every-day scenes of life.

The barren soul seems like a kaleidoscope, changing its relations at each experience, whether of joy or sorrow.  How beautiful is life, when we learn how much we can be to each other, and how varied may be the relations we bear to our friends.

CHAPTER XXV.

Miss Weston returned to her friends, and Dawn took up the thread of her life, which was every day extending and winding into new scenes of darkness and light.  But a voice within her, told her that one day all the darkness would become light.  She trusted that voice, for it was speaking unto her every day, and growing each hour into deeper recognition.  What avails the love of our friends, if it be but for a few earthly days or years?  What is the love of a mother to her child, without an eternity for its manifestation?  “Whatever has lived upon earth still lives.”

The mother, forced from her new-born child, sorrows over the physical separation.  It is natural; but what power does she not possess to live and breathe into its spiritual unfolding.  Silent, but subtle, like nature’s most potent forces, her spirit descends into its being, and there dwells, molding it every hour into a higher form of life.  Truth is at the basis of all theories, and, though man builds many a superstructure in accordance with his own fancy, he can in no way affect this truth.  It is a natural law of the universe, that love should linger and remain after the habiliments of flesh are withdrawn.  No one lives who has not felt, at times, the presence of the unseen; and it seems strange that there can be one so limited in thought and understanding as to say there is nought beyond the narrow limit of physical life to hold communion with our souls?  Happy the man who opens the doors of his spirit wide for angel visitors.  Happy the heart which knows by its own beating, when they come and go, for,

  “It is a faith sublime and sure,
    That ever round our head
  Are hovering on noiseless wing,
    The spirits of the dead.”

It has been said that nothing is more difficult than to demonstrate a self-evident truth.  To those who feel and know of this guardianship of friends, gone beyond, this affiliation of soul with soul, language is powerless to transmit the conviction.  It must be felt and experienced, not reasoned into the mind, because it is a component of the soul, a legitimate portion of its life.

“I must go, and remain away a long time,” said Dawn to her father, one morning, after they had just finished reading a letter from Florence.

“And why, may I ask?”