A gleam of light came into the man's dull, sad eyes, as he laid his fingers gently on the baby's sleeping face.
"He favors you, Miss Margaret," he said, "ay! and your father, the colonel."
"We call him Philip, after my father," replied Margaret, with a sorrowful inflection of her sweet voice.
"May God Almighty bless him and keep him from bringing you to sorrow!" said Andrew.
"I am willing to bear sorrow for him," answered Margaret.
"But not from him," he said.
"Yes; from him if that must be so," she replied, "he will grieve me sometimes, just as we also grieve God. But if God bears with us, we must bear with one another's faults, however hard it may be."
The stern, grave face of Andrew Goldsmith unbent a little and quivered, and his strong frame trembled as if shaken by some invisible force. He sank down on a chair, looking up into the pitying faces of the three women, whose eyes were so gently bent upon him.
"I haven't seen you since I lost my daughter," he said with a groan, "and oh! my God, she might have been standing as you are, come home to show me her baby."
It was true. If any stranger could have looked in on the little circle, he would have taken Margaret, in her plain black dress, with her child in her arms, for a young mother come back to the old fireside to