Tom Black kept his word, and when the ice was gone brought Bessie over in his boat to stay with Emily until she should go to the hospital.  It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon when they arrived and Bessie brought a good share of the sunshine into the cabin with her.

“Oh, Bessie!” cried Emily, as her friend burst into the room.  “I were thinkin’ you’d not be comin’, Bessie!  Oh, ‘tis fine t’ have you come!”

Tom remained the night, and he and Bessie cheered up the Grays, for it had been a lonely, monotonous period since their last visit, and never a caller save Douglas had they had.

Time, the great healer of sorrow, had somewhat mitigated the shock of Bob’s disappearance, and had reconciled them to some extent to his loss.  But now the sore was opened again when, one day, a grave was dug in the spruce woods behind the cabin, and the coffin, which had been resting upon the scaffold since January, was taken down and reverently lowered into the earth by Richard and Douglas.  Mrs. Gray, though still firm in the intuitive belief that her boy lived, wept piteously when the earth clattered down upon the box and hid it forever from view.

“I knows ’tis not Bob,” she sobbed, “but where is my lad?  What has become o’ my brave lad?”

Bessie, with wet eyes, comforted her with soothing words and gentle caresses.

Richard and Douglas did their work silently, both certain beyond a doubt that it was Bob they had laid to rest.

Nothing was said to Emily of the burial.  That would have done her no good and they did not wish to give her the pain that it would have caused.

The days were rapidly lengthening, and the sun coming boldly nearer the earth was tempering and mellowing the atmosphere, and every pleasant afternoon a couch was made for Emily out of doors, where she could bask in the sunshine, and breathe the air charged with the perfume of the spruce and balsam forest above, and drink in the wild beauties of the wilderness about her.

Here she lay, alone, one day late in June while her mother and Bessie washed the dinner dishes before Bessie came out to join her, and her father and Douglas, who had come over to dinner, smoked their pipes and chatted in the house.  She was listening to the joyous song of a robin, that had just returned from its far-off southland pilgrimage, and was thinking as she listened of the long, long journey that she was soon to take.  Her heart was sad, for it was a sore trial to be separated all the summer from her father and mother and never see them once.

She looked down the bight out towards the broader waters of the bay, for that was the way she was to go.  Suddenly as she looked a boat turned the point into the bight.  It was a strange boat and she could not see who was in it, but it held her attention as it approached, for a visitor was quite unusual at this time of the year.  Presently the single occupant stood up in the boat, to get a better view of the cabin.