" Then, with a soft, ringing voice, he repeated:
"'New friends will clasp your hand, dear, new faces on you smile--
You'll bide with them and love them, but you'll long for us the while;
For the word across the water, and the farewell by the stile--
For the true heart's here, my darlin'.'"
Mary Callen's tears flowed afresh at first; but soon after the voice
ceased she closed her eyes and her sobs stopped, and Father Corraine sat
down and became lost in thought as he watched the candle. Then there
went a word among the spirits watching that he was not thinking of the
candle, or of them that the candle was to light on the way, nor even of
this girl near him, but of a summer forty years gone when he was a goodly
youth, with the red on his lip and the light in his eye, and before him,
leaning on a stile, was a lass with--
" . . . cheeks like the dawn of day."
And all the good world swam in circles, eddying ever inward until it
streamed intensely and joyously through her eyes "blue as the fairy
flax." And he had carried the remembrance of this away into the world
with him, but had never gone back again. He had travelled beyond the
seas to live among savages and wear out his life in self-denial; and now
he had come to the evening of his life, a benignant figure in a lonely
land.
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