She was silent, and then she suddenly left the rail and moved on.
"Ah, well, if it could only stay bright like this until we came back together! But that is impossible. What we shall see together will be the snow lying softly over all, and the brown, curving line of the tree-tops and the pink sunset glow in the west. He will lie in his chair and I shall sit on a cushion thrown close beside him, and with that one hand that they have left him pressed to my face, we shall look out over all the wide, still world and talk of that future which no one can bar us out of, except our own two selves. God can say 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant,' but He proves in the saying that the doing and the goodness and the faith all emanated from the one who served. Religion is such a grand thing, Lassie; I can't understand any one with intelligence choosing to be an atheist. And lately, since I have realized that the real trinity is two who love and their God, I have been overcome at the mysticism of what life really means. Oh, I'm truly very, very happy. As I look over these hills and valleys, I think how all my life long I shall be coming back here—not to weep, but to remember. I shall be left lonely to a degree that hardly any one can comprehend, because for me there will be no possible chance of any earthly consolation; but in another sense I shall never know grief at all, for I know, with the absolute knowledge that I have attained to, that grief like all other finite things is unreal, and that my happiness is eternal."
They were now on the tracks quite near the hotel.
"I wonder if Mrs. Lathbun got a letter from her lawyer to-day," Lassie said, changing the subject suddenly.
They went up the steps and opened the door, and there in the hall, on her hurried way out to meet them, was Mrs. O'Neil, her face quite pale with excitement.
"Oh, what do you think?" she cried, opening the door into the dining-room; "come right in here. What do you think?"
"What is it?" both asked together.
"The biggest surprise you ever got in your life. They're swindlers!"
Alva stepped in quickly and shut the door. "What?" she stammered; "who?"
"They're swindlers, both of them! It's all in the Kinnecot paper." She held out a paper which she had in her hand to Alva. "You can read it; it isn't a bit of doubt but what it's them."