Dym, leaning back and closing her eyes, saw a quiet face with an ineffable smile stamped upon it, and knew that, wherever she went, one day she should see it again, "smiling at her like one of God's dear angels."

Dym was too weary to say much to Humphrey when he parted from her at the door of Ingleside. The servants went down-stairs and spoke pityingly of the young creature who looked so changed and pale in her deep mourning; even Mrs. Fortescue melted at the sight of the sad young face, and kissed her quite affectionately. Dym, who was yearning for love and sympathy, never forgot that kiss.

Dym would have been puzzled if any one had asked her how she spent her days. Humphrey came often, but he did not stay long; and by and by he went back to Mentone. Mr. Chichester had been seized with a low fever, which prolonged their stay; but as soon as he was able to bear the fatigue, Humphrey went to remove them to a cooler place; and by slow stages and frequent pauses he hoped to bring them safely to England by the middle of August.

Dym wrote long letters to Mrs. Chichester, and took endless walks with Kiddle-a-wink, and grew more miserable every day; she was longing for her friends-pining for them; and the delay grew more sickening each hour.

"We are coming home," wrote Humphrey at last to her, and Dym's heart gave a sudden bound; but as she read the next few words it sank lower and lower; "if all be well we shall be with you in another forty-eight hours-that is, Madam and the nurse and baby; but the squire has suddenly made up his mind to take a sea-voyage: he talks of going out by one of the Peninsular and Oriental steamers to Calcutta.

"He has shaken off the effects of his illness, but looks languid still. I think, for Madam's sake, it is a pity that the doctors have put this notion of a sea-voyage into his head. for if he once get away from us one can never know when he will come back again. I think it is better to face trouble than to run away from it, as he has done all his life," finished Humphrey, in his blunt way.

As Dym opened this letter, a note dropped out and fell to the ground. Dym's hand fairly shook as she picked it up, and the color rushed to her face, for she recognized Mr. Chichester's handwriting:

"MY DEAR MISS ELLIOTT,-Perhaps you have thought that I might have written before; but what is there that we can find to say to each other? There is only one person to whom, in all these four months, I could have borne to have spoken of my trouble, and that is your brother, and he is dead. Had he lived, I might have spent a lifetime at St. Luke's, trying to work out some of my misery, instead of vainly endeavoring to crush it out in miles of ocean. So you have lost him! I am grieved still more in my grief to know it; but be comforted; you are too young to break your heart, and life has something in reserve for you. I am sending my mother and child home to Ingleside. I know you will love and take care of them. Be my faithful little friend, still, and help my mother to forget some of her cares.

"God bless you! When you have a prayer to spare, you may waste it on one who is ever your true friend,

"GUY LATIMER CHICHESTER."

It was that letter, so curt, so tender, yet so bitter in its sorrow, that first roused Dym from the apathy of her own grief.

The harvest-fields were being reaped round Birstwith when Mrs. Chichester bade farewell to her son and came back to her solitary home, escorted by the faithful Humphrey.

Dym ran out on the sunny terrace to receive them, and just in time to see Humphrey assisting the foreign-looking nurse to descend from the carriage.

Dym stretched out her arms when she caught sight of the fluttering white cloak and dimpled hands. "Oh, give me the baby!" she cried; and as she stooped over it the child opened a pair of solemn gray eyes and smiled at her.

"Little Florence, little Florence, how I shall love you!" whispered Dym; and, for the first time since Will's death, something like returning happiness stole into her face.

CHAPTER XXX.

ALL IN THE WILD MARCH MORNING."

THREE years and a half have passed away since the events recorded in the last chapter-more than three whole years since Guy Chichester took his passage in the "Montezuma" en route for Calcutta; and still Ingleside is without its master. It is more than eighteen months now since they have heard from him.

And some who loved him well say that the brief unhappy life is finished, and that Guy Chichester will never come back to his own again.

Mr. Fortescue says so, and Cousin Katherine; and Humphrey even shakes his honest head more sadly every day when the squire's name is mentioned; and Beatrix Delaire puts on mourning, and cries her beautiful eyes quite dim for the cousin she has lost; but still the mother hopes and prays, and stretches out her arms to Dym when she comes in to wish her a grave good-night.

"What was it he said? tell me again, my dear." And Dym whispers the words, which have become a part of her creed: "He will come back, my girl; I know him so well: these noble souls are not left to wander away in outer darkness. And as Mrs. Chichester kisses her, and calls her her comforter, Dym's lip trembles, and her eyes fill with tears, for she knows that, whether he is dead or alive, the mother will never look upon her son's face again.

Mrs. Chichester has wept herself blind again.

"God bless dear papa, and bring him home to Flossie and gran'ma," lisps little Florence, night after night, at Dym's knee; and in the morning, when the solemn gray eyes open, she wakes Dym to ask, "Has papa come back yet?"

Florence knows her father's face by heart; she kisses it every night when she says her prayers. "Papa isn't pretty, like mamma or auntie," thinks Flossie; she likes mamma's face best. A tender image of that sweet mother is already

enshrined in the child's mind, a faint glory of shining raiment and white wings and smiling eyes, like the angel she sees at church. On Sunday evenings Dym takes her on her lap and tells her about that loving guardianship; she talks about her father on other evenings; but on these quiet Sabbath hours she speaks of Honor to Honor's child.

She and Florence exchanged confidences. Dym has quaint sweet theories of her own: it is to her an article of faith that Honor is watching over her little daughter. Florence is not quite sure about the wings-does auntie know? A grand beautiful lady, all in white, kissed her last night; Florence could see the stars shining round her head.

"Perhaps papa will come to-night," finishes Florence, sleepily; "but I like mamma's kisses best, only I think she was crying, for my face was quite wet in the morning." Dym holds her peace; she would not have told Florence for worlds that it was only a dream-that it was her kisses and tears that the child felt, when Dym was saying her prayers beside her in the moonlight.

Dym thinks of little Florence when she reads Nathan's story of the ewe lamb; for three years, ever since her foster-mother left the ten-months-old babe, Honor's child has slept in her bosom, and grown into her heart of hearts.

Dym does not know what she would have done all these years without the child! ever since the long illness through which she nursed her, and which threatened to extinguish the precious little life, Florence had seemed to belong to her more than to any one else. They tell me her own mother could not have done more for her," wrote Guy Chichester, in one of those rare letters of his. "Heaven reward you for all your goodness to me and mine!"

Dym carried that letter about with her wherever she went. It was more than eighteen months since she received it he was coming home then. He was sick and weary of wandering, so he said, and was longing, with a feverish longing that surprised himself, to see the child that death had so nearly snatched away from him. "I think it is a punishment on my own hard-heartedness," he wrote; "I ought not to have stayed away so long from Honor's child."

What had he been doing with himself those two years? His letters made the two women giddy to read them: now he

was tiger-hunting in the Indian jungles, now studying Hindostanee and teaching young natives in a missionary settlement; then he had made his way to Australia; when he last wrote, he had already taken his passage home in a vessel leaving Melbourne. It was the fate of that vessel, the "Rose and Crown," that made Beatrix Delaire put on mourning for her cousin, and that dimmed the mother's eyes with anguish; for, hundreds of leagues from land, right out on the blue Pacific, the noble ship had caught fire, and nearly every soul on board had perished miserably. One boat's crew had indeed escaped, and two of the survivors, who had contrived after innumerable hardships to reach one of the coral-reef islands, had within the last few months been interrogated by Humphrey at Liverpool, and, according to their account, Guy Chichester had been left in the burning vessel. One man there was, indeed, who had manned the boat with his fierce energy, and without whom not one of all that boatful would have survived to tell the tale, but even he had succumbed to the exhaustion of thirst and fever. "We dropped him down as decently as we could, and one of us said a bit of a prayer over him; but we had hardly strength to pitch the others overboard. Dawson here says his name was Leicester or Latimer." And Humphrey wringing the poor fellow's hand, turned away without a word, for he thought, and others thought too, that that dominant spirit among the boat-crew of despairing men was Guy Latimer Chichester. And Humphrey went up to Ingleside and told Dym-every one came to Dym now in their troubles; she was so gentle and helpful, she looked at them with such wistful kind eyes.

Dym was "Miss Elliott" still in the household, but Florence called her "Auntie." Uncle Humphrey had taught her to say it long ago, and Mrs. Chichester loved the name, for Dym was almost like her own daughter to the poor lady.

Dym shielded her face as she listened to Humphrey's story. Humphrey saw her shudder once, as though the strange coincidence of the name struck her; but when he had finished she uncovered her eyes and looked at him, and the lines of the mouth unbent slightly in their sweet gravity.

"Do you believe this was he, Humphrey?"

66

Ay, surely; there can be no room for doubt, I fear." "And you think he is lying miles below the Pacific; that he will never come home, never see his child again? We don't