would think, as she looked at the tired, sullen face of the old
man bent to the window-pane, afraid to go out. But they had very
cheerful little suppers there by themselves in the odd, bare
little room, as homely and clean as Lois herself.

Sometimes, late at night, when he had gone to bed, she sat alone
in the door, while the moonlight fell in broad patches over the
square, and the great poplars stood like giants whispering
together. Still the far sounds of the town came up cheerfully,
while she folded up her knitting, it being dark, thinking how
happy an ending this was to a happy day. When it grew quiet, she
could hear the solemn whisper of the poplars, and sometimes
broken strains of music from the cathedral in the city floated
through the cold and moonlight past her, far off into the blue
beyond the hills. All the keen pleasure of the day, the warm,
bright sights and sounds, coarse and homely though they were,
seemed to fade into the deep music, and make a part of it.

Yet, sitting there, looking out into the listening night, the
poor child's face grew slowly pale as she heard it. It humbled
her. It made her meanness, her low, weak life so plain to her!
There was no pain nor hunger she had known that did not find a
voice in its articulate cry. SHE! what was she? The pain and
wants of the world must be going up to God in that sound, she
thought. There was something more in it,--an unknown meaning of
a great content that her shattered brain struggled to grasp. She
could not. Her heart ached with a wild, restless longing. She
had no words for the vague, insatiate hunger to understand. It
was because she was ignorant and low, perhaps; others could know.
She thought her Master was speaking. She thought that unknown