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,
two men came over the prairie slowly towards the town, and both raised
their heads to the sound of the church-bell calling to prayer.
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