Yet, if the girl had looked from her bedroom window, this Friday night,
she would have seen on the far hill a sign; for there burned a fire
beside which sat two travellers who had come from the uttermost limits of
snow. But as the fire burned--a beacon to her heart if she had but known
it--she went to her bed, the words of a song she had sung at choir--
practice with tears in her voice and in her heart ringing in her ears.
A concert was to be held after the service on the coming Sunday night,
at which there was to be a collection for funds to build another mission-
house a hundred miles farther North, and she had been practising music
she was to sing. Her mother had been an amateur singer of great power,
and she was renewing her mother's gift in a voice behind which lay a
hidden sorrow. As she cried herself to sleep the words of the song which
had moved her kept ringing in her ears and echoing in her heart:

"When the swallows homeward fly,
And the roses' bloom is o'er--"

But her mother, looking out into the night, saw on the far hill the fire,
burning like a star, where she had never seen a fire set before, and a
hope shot into her heart for her daughter--a hope that had flamed up and
died down so often during the past year. Yet she had fanned with
heartening words every such glimmer of hope when it came, and now she
went to bed saying, "Perhaps he will come to-morrow." In her mind, too,
rang the words of the song which had ravished her ears that night, the
song she had sung the night before her own husband, Luke Allingham, had
gone with Franklin to the Polar seas:

"When the swallows homeward fly--"

As she and her daughter entered the little church on the Sunday evening,