Just a little voice, calling through the dark, “Mamma, O mamma!” and then a low sound of stifled sobbing.

Colonel Trevethick heard them both, and they smote him with a new sense of loss and pain. He had scarcely thought of his little girl since his wife died, five hours before,—died at the very instant when she was kissing him good-by, taking with her into the far heavens the warm breath of his human love. He had loved her as, perhaps, men seldom love, from the first hour of their first meeting.

“There is Maud Harrison,” some one had said; and he had turned to look, and met the innocent gaze of two frank, gentle, very beautiful brown eyes. “Brightest eyes that ever have shone,” he said to himself. Their owner had other charms besides,—a fair and lovely face, round which the ruffled hair made a soft, bright halo; a lithe, girlish figure; a manner of unaffected cordiality, blent with a certain maidenly reserve, and which seemed to him perfection. He loved her, then and there. His wooing was short and his wedding hasty; but he had never repented his haste, never known an unhappy hour from the moment he brought his wife home, nine years ago, till these last few days, in which he had seen that no love or care of his could withhold her from going away from him to another home where he could not follow her,—the home where she had gone now, far beyond his search.

She was a good little creature, and she did not rebel even at the summons to go out of her earthly Eden in search of the paradise of God. She longed, indeed, to live, for she so loved her own, and she could have resigned herself to die more willingly but for her husband’s uncontrollable passion of woe. That very day she had said to him, as he knelt beside her,—

“Do not grieve so, darling! I am not going so far but that I shall come back to you every day. Something tells me that I shall be always near you and Maudie. You cannot call, or she cry, but that I shall hear you. I know that when she most needs, or you most want me, I shall be close beside you.”

And with that very last kiss, when her breath was failing, she had whispered,—

“I shall not go so far as you think.”

Now when he heard the low call of his little Maudie and her smothered sobbing, he remembered the words of his dead wife. Did she, indeed, hear Maudie cry, and was it possibly troubling her? He got up and went into the little room where the child had slept alone ever since her sixth birthday, a couple of months ago. He bent over her low bed, and asked tenderly,—

“What is it, darling?”

A tiny night-gowned figure lifted itself up and two little arms clung round his neck.

“Bessie put me to bed without taking me to mamma. Mamma did not kiss me good-night, and I want she should,—oh, I want she should! Bessie wouldn’t carry me to see her; and I want you to. Bessie said mamma never would kiss me again but that isn’t true, is it? You know I’ve heard mamma say Bessie wasn’t always ’sponsible.”

Colonel Trevethick considered for a moment what he should say to his child—how he could make her understand the great, sad, awful, yet triumphant mystery which had come to pass that day under their roof—the great loss, and the great hope that hallowed it.

She was such a mere baby it seemed hard to choose his words. Must he tell her that her mamma would never kiss her again? But how did he know that? When the dear Lord promised the “all things” to those who loved Him, did it not include the joining of broken threads, the up-springing of dead hopes, the finding one’s own again, somewhere? He thought it must; for what a word without meaning heaven would be to him if his own Maud were not there! He temporized a little.

“She cannot kiss you now, my darling, but you shall kiss her.”

So he lifted the little white figure in his arms, holding it close, as one who must be father and mother both together, now, and carried his little one across the hall to the room, where her dead mother lay,—oh, so fast asleep!—with a look like a smile frozen upon her fair, sweet face. He held Maudie down by the pillow on which her mother’s head rested, but that did not satisfy her.

“Put me on the bed, please, papa. I get on the bed every night and kiss her, since she’s been ill.”

So he let her have her will; and for a moment she nestled close to the still dead heart, which had always beaten for her so warmly. Then she lifted up her head.

“Mamma is very cold,” she said, “and she does not stir. Can she hear what I say?”

Again something invisible seemed to warn him against taking away from the child her mother. He answered very gently and slowly,—

“She’s dead, my darling,—what we call dead. I do not understand it—no one understands it; but it comes, one day, to everybody, and it is God’s will. Your mamma cannot speak to us any more, and soon she will be gone out of our sight; but she truly believed that she would always be able to see your face and hear your voice, as when she was here.”

“She is here. Won’t she be here always?” the little girl asked, growing cold with the shadow of an awful fear.

“No, dear, she will not be here long. In a few days this dear white face will be put away, underneath the grass and the flowers; but the real mamma, who loves little Maudie, will not be buried up. She will be somewhere, I truly believe, where she can see and hear her little girl.”

For a moment the child slid again from his arms, and nestled close against the cold breast, kissed the unmoving lips. Then she said,—

“Good-by, this mamma, who can’t see; and good-night, other mamma, that hears Maudie.”

Colonel Trevethick marvelled. Had he, indeed, succeeded in making this little creature understand; or had some one whom he could not see spoken to her words of sweet mother-wisdom?

He carried her then, and laid her in her little bed, and went back to his own loneliness; but half an hour afterward he heard the small voice calling. “Papa, papa!” and again he went to her, and the little arms came up around his neck, and held him fast.

“Can’t I go too, papa? If you ask God, won’t He let me? Because I do so love my mamma.”

That afternoon Colonel Trevethick had felt as if he had nothing at all left in this world; but now he realized how much emptier still his home might be if he lost out of it this child who was so like her mother.

“Mamma would not want you to come,” he said passionately. “She has all heaven, and I only you,—only you, little Maudie, in all the world. Mamma wants you to stay with me.”

After that she was quite quiet; and when he looked in at her, an hour later, she was sound asleep, with one little hand like a crushed white rose under the red rose of her flushed cheek.

She never asked for her mother after that night; but her father was sure that she never forgot her. She was the strangest, gravest little creature. She never made any noise, even at her play; and she never did any of the things for which her mother had been used to reprove her. The trouble was that she was too perfect; there was something unnatural about it which frightened Colonel Trevethick. He would have been glad if she had been naughty, sometimes, like other children. He longed to have her tease him, to see in her some spirit of naughtiness or contradiction; but he saw none. She grew tall quite fast, but she was very thin,—a little white wraith of a creature, who looked as if she had been made out of snow, and might melt away as soon.

It was a good thing for Colonel Trevethick, no doubt, that he had her to tend, and to be anxious about. It kept him from surrendering himself to his own grief.

Nearly two years went on, and all the time the little girl grew more and more frail; until, at last, when she had just passed her eighth birthday, she was taken very ill. Her illness seemed a sort of low, nervous fever, and she grew daily more feeble. A skilful nurse came to share with Bessie the task of tending her, and her father was seldom far away. Half the day he would be sitting in her room, and half a dozen times in the night he would steal in to watch her breathing.

One afternoon, as he sat by her bed, she looked up at him with a sad, tender look, too old for her years,—but then all her words and ways were too old for her years.

“Papa,” she said, “I would get well if I could, to please you. I should get well, I know, if I had mamma to nurse me. Don’t you know how she used, if my head ached, to put her hand on it and make it stop?”

A sudden mist of tears came between his eyes and the little white face looking up at him. She had not spoken before of her mother for so many months, and yet how well she remembered! Instantly his wife’s words, that last day, came back to his memory. She had said, “I know that when Maudie needs me most, or you most want me, I shall be there beside you.”

Was she there now? Could she breathe upon the little wasting life some merciful dew of healing? or was she, perhaps, by her very love and longing, drawing the child home to herself?

That night Bessie was to sit up until one o’clock, and then to call the nurse. As for Colonel Trevethick, he would be in and out, as usual.

He went to bed, and fell into sleep and a dream. His own Maud was beside him as he saw her first, then as his bride, his wife, then with Baby Maudie on her breast; just as of old he seemed to have her with him again,—his pride, his darling, the one woman he had ever loved.

He woke at last. Had his dream, then, lasted the night through? Was this red ray that touched his face the first hint of the rising sun? He sprang up quickly. The whole night had indeed passed, and he had not seen Maudie. He hurried into a dressing-gown and went to her room. He expected to find the nurse there, but, instead, Bessie sat beside the table just where he had left her the night before, but sound asleep. Evidently she must have been asleep for hours, and had not called the nurse, who had slept in her turn: they were all tired enough, Heaven knows. But, meantime, what of Maudie? What harm had come to her, alone, unattended?

He drew aside the curtain of her little bed and looked in. Surely this was not the Maud he had left the night before, so pale and worn upon her pillows? A face looked up at him bright as the new day. A soft, healthy color was in the cheeks, and the moist lips were crimson.

“I knew I should be well if she tended me,” a voice cried, gayer and gladder than he had heard from her lips in two years.

What did the child mean? Had she gone mad? He controlled himself, and asked,—

“Who tended you, my child? I found Bessie sound asleep.”

“Yes; mamma made her sleep, and you, and nurse. She sent all of you the dreams you like best; and all night long she sat here beside my bed, with her hand on my head, just as she used to put it long ago. She was all in white, and her hair fell about her shoulders, and her eyes were very, very bright, and her lips, when she kissed me, seemed somehow to melt away.”

“So you, too, dreamed about mamma, darling?”

“No, indeed, papa, I did not dream. Mamma sat there all night long, with her hand upon my head. Sometimes I slept, but more often I woke up to look at her; and all the time she sat there, and did not tire, until the first sunshine came in at the windows; and then she kissed me and went away. I did not see her go. Perhaps I shut my eyes a moment. Then I looked and she was gone, and then I heard you coming in. She said she was with me every day, but she couldn’t have come to me like this, except because I needed her so very, very much. And she wanted to make me well, because you would grieve for me if I came to her; and I was to be very good, and tend you and make you comfortable; and I must laugh and must make you laugh, for laughter was good, and the reason I got ill was because I had been sorry so long, and had not laughed at all. And I was not to be sorry after her any more, because she was very happy, and nothing grieved her except when she saw you and me mourning for her, and not knowing that she was waiting close beside us.”

“Was it her mother? Can it be it was the child’s mother?” the father cried, uttering his thought aloud unconsciously.

“Of course it was mamma; and she has made me well. See if Dr. Dale does not tell you I am well.”

Two hours afterward Dr. Dale came. He stood for a few moments beside the little bed. He looked in the child’s glad eyes, he counted the throbs of her pulse, he made her put out her healthy little tongue. Then he turned to her father.

“Trevethick,” he said, “can you swear that this is the same little girl I left here last night? If the days of miracles were not gone by, I should say that one had been wrought here. I left, I thought, a very sick little person, about whom I was anxious enough, certainly, to make this my first call this morning; and I find my small patient so well that I shall only keep her in bed a day or two longer, for form’s sake.”

“Perhaps it is a miracle,” Colonel Trevethick said, smiling. But he did not explain. There are some experiences too marvellous for belief and too sacred for doubt or question, and that was one of them.

Two days afterward little Maudie went down to tea. She wore a fresh white gown, with lovely blue ribbons, and looked as much like a little angel in festal attire as a human child can be expected to look. But she did not take her usual seat. She sat down, instead, behind the tea-pot, where Bessie usually stood to pour out the tea.

“Hadn’t Bessie better do that?” papa asked, as he saw the little hand close round the handle of the tea-pot.

But Maud laughed, and shook her head.

“No, I don’t think Bessie is ’sponsible,” she said; “and mamma said I was to live just on purpose to do every thing for papa.”

And again Colonel Trevethick asked, but this time silently,—

“Was it—could it have been the child’s mother?”