As Baptist Sloan clicked the latch of his front gate behind him, and stood a moment in the path, the familiar outlines of his old home rising up in the dim light smote him with fresh pain. The thirty years of hope and struggle were there to meet him with accusing faces and to turn his home-coming into bitterness unspeakable--such bitterness as only those can know who have cringed under the slow heartbreak of utter failure. He did not even unlock the door, but dropping his carpet-bag and umbrella on the porch floor, sank down into the old wooden rocker, covering his face with his hands.

It was in this att.i.tude that Luella found him an hour later, when she came hurrying down the path with quick, fluttering steps. The moonlight, struggling through the vines on the porch, showed her the object of her search.

"I just now heard you was home!" she cried, with a nervous little laugh.

"It was in the evening paper, all about it. The doctor stopped by and showed it to me."

She paused on the top step, out of breath, and awed by the rigid despair showing in every line of the silent figure. She had divined that he might need comfort, but she was not prepared for such desolation as this. Silently she took another step toward him, then another, and laid her hand timidly on his shoulder. His only response was a long, s.h.i.+vering sigh.

"Oh, Bap, _don't_!" she cried. "Don't take it like _that_!"

"I've give' up," he said dully. "Seems as if it wa'n't worth while to go on living any longer, when I've made such an awful failure. It's the hope of a lifetime blasted, and I can't help feelin' that some way or 'nother mother knows it, too, and is disappointed in me."

She gathered the bowed head in her arms, and pressing it toward her, began stroking it with soothing touches, as tenderly as if she had been that disappointed mother.

"There, there!" she sobbed, with a choking voice. "You sha'n't say that again. The world might count it a failure, same as they would a race-horse that didn't get under the wire first. But what if you didn't get there, Bap, _think how you ran_! You went just as far as the Lord let you, and n.o.body can count it a failure when He stepped in and stopped you. Look at Moses! He didn't get to his Promised Land either.

Maybe it ain't right for me to make Bible comparisons, but you went just as far as he did, where you could stand and look over, and I'm proud of you _for_ it. It's a sight farther than most people get."

There was tender silence for a little s.p.a.ce, then she descended from the Pisgah on which she had placed him and came down to the concerns of every-day life. When she spoke again it was with her usual bustling air of authority.

"Here, I've brought the key," she said. "Stick your carpet-bag inside the door, and come home with me. Jordan or no Jordan, you've got to have a cup of tea and a good hot supper."

THE END.