But every visit was singularly quiet and each man went away softly and silently, speaking no word to

anyone.

Robert Kelder was much exhausted by these visits and his wife could not forbear a few words of remonstrance. "You should think of me, Robert. It was ill bidding those men in my house."

"Mary," he answered, "they were my bitter enemies. In kirk and in market they wronged me, slandered me and injured me. Maybe I was not innocent. I said ill of them and I did them all the ill I could manage to do, so I did not dare to ask God's full mercy and dying help while my faults with them were unacknowledged and unforgiven. We put all right today and for the sake of the Man of Nazareth, who died for each one of us, we shook hands and bade each other a kindly farewell. I'm no carin' to meet any o' the four in the next life."

For three days he lay very quiet and Mary sat by his side. Sometimes Jan's strong arms raised him for a little rest, or his brother Thomas whispered a word or two in his ear, or Sheila sang softly in the next room about "The Land of the Leal," so for the last three days Robert Kelder's room was a tabernacle of love and peace and heavenly hope. Then at midnight there was a sudden cry and

quick movements all through the house. Cecil went hurriedly out and came back with a famous physician and two strange women and Jan and his uncle remained with the dying man. Hour after hour passed anxiously away but just at dawning a wonderful cry rang through the house, a cry like nothing else, a cry never to be mistaken-the cry of a new born infant. Jan said fervently, "Thank God!" In a few minutes Cecil, white as a ghost but unconsciously crying with joy, came softly into the room:

"Tell him it is a boy, a fine boy, and Sheila is all right. Oh, Jan! Jan!"

But when Jan turned to his father, he had gone away. Did the two souls meet on the threshold as one soul went out and the other came in? Did they know each other? Did they speak to each other? What did they say? Who can tell?

CHAPTER IX

LOVE IS DESTINY

Love is destiny, and the heart is its own fate.

Love is blessing, is salvation, is our guardian genius; without it the centrifugal law would overpower us, and sweep our souls from their source to the cold extremities of the Material and the Manifold.

M

Y READERS must have realized long ere this that my hero is no extraordinary

young man, neither noble by birth nor perfect by nature, and without any wonderful dream of benefiting or elevating society. But above all, he wants that great attribute of the fashionable modern hero-the stumbling stone of Atheism tied to his foot. Jan, with all his faults, had an unalterable, unswerving faith in the God of his fathers and an almost awful prepossession in favor of the Bible. He was brave and prompt for all the troubles and perplexities of daily life and he would have been equally ready for the battlefield if his country had needed him there.

Courage, love of his native land, personal honor

and business integrity ran with his blood. They were as natural to him as the use of his muscles or his eyes. For he had drunk them in his mother's milk, been fed on them and grown with them, as a man must do, if he is to have them at all; for nothing is surer than this: Love of God and country, courage, honor, integrity, must run in the mother's milk before they run in the child's blood.

So far then, Jansen Kelder had in him the makings of a good man. His noble-hearted mother had fed him through the forming period of his life with her own piety, courage and integrity, and that is a teaching no future ill-teaching can ever eradicate. For the rest he was the handsome, clean, good-natured fellow that is within every one's love or at least knowledge. The temptations Jan had to meet are such as assail every young man in greater or less measure; his hopes and ambitions such as stimulate youth at all times and in all circumstances. Yet they were not made less important by their universality nor less difficult to manage or endure by their constant relationship to the wants and necessities of everyday life.

His father's death made Jansen Kelder a much richer man. Robert Kelder had accumulated far more money and real estate than anyone supposed;

and he left a wise, well-ordered will which no one disputed. To his far-off sons he had written his intentions and received authentic assurances of their perfect satisfaction. The rest was simple enough. All he possessed at his death was left to his son Jansen excepting the home in which he had so long lived; this was to be his wife's with one thousand pounds a year for its maintenance. Sheila's portion had been given her at her marriage, and there was no ill-will and no disputing about the wishes and directions of the late Robert Kelder.

"Robin has taught me a good lesson," said Thomas Kelder. "It is an ill thing when a dead man's name is cast about in anger and spite and he beyond the knowledge of it."

So Robert Kelder had his way, even after his death, except in one thing—his wife would not stay in the house his death had left desolate. She wished to go to London with Jan and Sheila and the desire was so natural no one thought of opposing it. Indeed, Mary Kelder was sure that Robert knew now, if never before, that a mother's heart would be with her children and not with a stone house and some sticks of well-used furniture.

In consequence of this resolve, Jan rented a house in the vicinity of Cecil and Sheila's residence and his