being who refused me a kindly smile, a sympathizing word, has gone,
never to return. May God go with her and give her a happy home, and
make her true and loving to those motherless little ones!



Chapter 19

XIX.

OCTOBER 1.

I Have had a charming summer with dear mother; and now I have the
great joy, so long deferred, of having her in my own home. Ernest has
been very cordial about it, and James has settled up all her worldly
affairs, so that she has nothing to do now but to love us and let us
love her. It is a pleasant picture to see her with my little darlings
about her, telling the old sweet story she told me so often, and
making God and Heaven and Christ such blissful realities. As I
listen, I realize that it is to her I owe that early, deeply-seated
longing to please the Lord Jesus, which I never remember as having a
beginning, or an ending, though it did have its fluctuations. And it
is another pleasant picture to see her sit in her own old chair,
which Ernest was thoughtful enough to have brought for her, pondering
cheerfully over her Bible and her Thomas a Kempis just as I have seen
her do ever since I can remember. And there is still a third pleasant
picture, only that it is a new one; it is as she sits at my right
hand at the table, the living personification of the blessed gospel
of good tidings, with father, opposite, the fading image of the law
given by Moses. For father has come back; father and all his