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step, where Shadrach had knelt in the bloom of his young manhood; she knew to an inch the spot which his knees had pressed twenty winters before—his out-line as he had knelt, his hat on the step beside him, God was good. Surely her husband must kneel there again-—-a son on each side, as he had said; George just here, Jim just there. By long watching the spot as she worshipped, it became as if she saw the three returned ones there kneeling; the two slim outlines of her boys, the more bulky form between them; their hands clasped, their heads shaped against the eastern wall. The fancy grew almost to an hallacination; she could never turn her worn eyes to the step without seeing them there.

Nevertheless, they did not come. Heaven was merciful, but it was not yet pleased to relieve her soul, This was her purgation for the sin of making them the slaves of her ambition. But it became more than purgation soon, and her mood approached despair, Months had passed since the brig had been due, but it had not returned.

Joanna was always hearing or seeing evidences of their arrival. When on the bill behind the port, whence a view of the open channel could be obtained, she felt sure that a little speck on the horizon, breaking the eternally level waste of watera southward, was the truck of the Joanna’s main-mast, Or when in-doors, a shout or excitement of any kind at the corner of the Town Cellar, where the high street joined the quay, caused her to spring to her feet and cry, ”Tis they!”

But it was not. The visionary forms knelt every Sunday afternoon on the chancel step, but not the real. Her shop had, as it were, eaten itself hollow. In the apathy which had resulted from her loneliness and grief she had ceased to take in the smallest supplies, and thus had sent away ber last customer.