But the details of the plan at Brickfields would make a long story within a story; we may have further glimpses of it, on beyond; we must not leave our friends now standing in the street.

Mr. Kirkbright held out his hand to Desire, as he stopped to speak with her.

"I am going down to Vireo's," he said. "I have come to a place in my work where I want him."

"So have I," said Desire. "But he is not at home. I was going next to Miss Euphrasia."

"And you and I are sent to stop each other. My sister is away, at Milton, for two days."

Desire turned round. "Then I must go home again," she said.

Mr. Kirkbright moved on, down the hill beside her.

"Can I do anything for you?" he inquired.

"Yes," returned Desire, pausing, and looking gravely up at him. "If you could go down to Luclarion Grapp's,—the Neighbors, you know,—and carry some kind of a promise to a poor thing who has just been brought there, and who thinks there is no promise in the world; a woman who tried to kill her baby to get him out of it, and who says that the world is hell, and people don't know they've got into it. Go and tell her some of the things you told me, that morning up at Brickfields."

"You have been to her? What have you told her yourself, already?"

"I told her that it was not all badness when one could feel the misery of the badness. That her pain at it was God's pain for her. That if He had done with her, she would be dead."

"Would she believe you? Did she seem to begin to believe?"

"I do not think she believes anything. She can't until the things to believe in come to her. Mr. Vireo—or you—would make her see. I told her I would send somebody who had more for her than I."

"You have told her the first message,—that the kingdom is at hand. The Christ-errand must be done next. The full errand of help. That was what was sent to the world, after the voice had cried in the wilderness. It isn't Mr. Vireo or I,—but the helping hand; the righting of condition; the giving of the new chance. We must not leave all that to death and the angels. Miss Desire, this woman must go to our mountain-refuge; to our sanatorium of souls. I have a good deal to tell you about that."

They had walked on again, as they talked; they had come to the foot of Borden Street. They must now turn two different ways.

They were standing a moment at the corner, as Mr. Kirkbright spoke. When he said "our refuge,—our sanatorium,"—Desire blushed again as she had blushed at Brickfields.

She was provoked at herself; why need personal pronouns come in at all? Why, if they did, need they remind her of herself and him, instead of merely the thoughts that they had had together, the intent of which was high above them both? Why need she be pleased and shy in her selfhood,—ashamed lest he should detect the thought of pleasure in her at his sharing with her his grand purpose, recognizing in her the echo of his inspiration? What made it so different that Christopher Kirkbright should discover and acknowledge such a sympathy between them, from her meeting it, as she had long done, in Miss Euphrasia?

She would not let it be different; she would not be such a fool.

It was twilight, and her little lace veil was down. She took courage behind it, and in her resolve,—for she knew that to be very determined would make her pale, not red; and the next time she would be on her guard, and very determined.

She gave him the hand he held out his own for, and bade him good evening, with her head lifted just imperceptibly higher than was its wont, and her face turned full toward him. Her eyes met his with an honest calmness; she had summoned herself back.

He saw strength and earnestness; a flush of feeling; the face of a woman made to look nobleness and enthusiasm into the soul of a man.

* * * * *

She sat in the library that evening at nine o'clock.

She had drawn up her large chair to the open fire; her feet were resting on the low fender; her eyes were watching shapes in the coals.

Mrs. Lewes's "Middlemarch" lay on her lap; she had just begun to read it. Her hands, crossed upon each other, had fallen upon the page; she had found something of herself in those first chapters. Something that reminded of her old longings and hindrances; of the shallowness and half-living that had been about her, and the chafe of her discontent in it.

She did not wonder that Dorothea was going to marry Mr. Casaubon. Into some dream-trap just such as that she might have fallen, had a Mr. Casaubon come in her way.

Instead, had come pain and mistake; a keen self-searching; a learning to bear with all her might, to work, and to wait.

She had not been waiting for any making good in God Providence of that special happiness which had passed her by. If she had, she would not have been doing the sort of work she had taken into her hands. When we wait for one particular hope, and will not be satisfied with any other, the whole force of ourselves bends toward it; we dictate to life, and wrest its tendencies at every turn.

The thing comes. Ask,—with the real might of whatever asking there is in you,—and it shall be given you. But when you have got it, it may not be the thing you thought it would be. Whosoever will have his life shall lose it.

No; Desire Ledwith had rather turned away from all special hope, thinking it was over for her. But she came to believe that all the good in God's long years was not over; that she had not been hindered from one thing, save to be kept for some other that He saw better. She was willing to wait for his better,—his best. When she paused to look at her life objectively, she rejoiced in it as the one thread—a thread of changing colors—in God's manifold work, that He was letting her follow alone with Him, and showing her the secret beauty of. Up and down, in and out, backward and forward, she wrought it after his pattern, and discerned continually where it fell into combinations that she had never planned,—made surprises for her of effects that were not her own. There is much ridicule of mere tapestry and broidery work, as a business for women's fingers; but I think the secret, uninterpreted charm of it, to the silliest sorters of colors and counters of stitches, is beyond the fact, as the beauty of children's plays is the parable they cannot help having in them. Patient and careful doing, after a law and rule,—and the gradual apparition of result, foreseen by the deviser of the law and rule; it is life measured out upon a canvas. Who knows how,—in this spiritual Kindergarten of a world,—the rudiments of all small human devices were set in human faculty and aptness for its own object-teaching toward a perfect heavenly enlightenment?

Desire was thinking to-night, how impossible it is, as the pattern of life grows, to help seeing a little of the shapes it may be taking; to refrain from a looking forward that becomes eager with a hint of possible unfolding.

Once, a while ago, she had thought that she discerned a green beauty springing out from the dull, half-filled background; tender leaves forming about a bare and awkward shoot; but suddenly there were no more stitches in that direction that she could set; the leaves stopped short in half-developed curves that never were completed. The pattern set before her—given but one bit at a time, as life patterns are, like part etchings of a picture in which you know not how the spaces are to be filled up and related—changed; the place, and the tint of the thread, changed also; she had to work on in a new part, and in a different way. She could not discover then, that these abortive leaves were the slender claspings of a calyx, in whose midst might sometime fit the rose-bloom of a wonderful joy. Was she discovering it now? For browns and grays,—generous and strong, tender and restful,—was a flush of blossom hues that she had not looked for, coming to be woven in? Was the empty calyx showing the first shadowy petal-shapes of a most perfect flower?

It might be the flower of a gracious friendship only a joining of hands in work for the kingdom-building; she did not let herself go farther than this. But it was a friendship across which there lay no bar and somehow, while she put from herself the thought that it might ever be so promised to her as to be hers of all the world and to the world's exclusion,—while she resented in herself that foolish girl's blush, and resolved that it should never come again,—she sat here to-night thinking how grand and perfect a thing for a woman a grand man's friendship is; how it is different from any, the most pure and sweet, of woman-tenderness; how the crossing of her path with such a path as Christopher Kirkbright's, if it were only once a day, or once a week, or once a month, would be a thing to reckon joy and courage from; to live on from, as she lived on from her prayers.

An hour had come in her life which gathered about her realities of heaven, whether the earthly correspondence should concur, or no. A noble influence which had met and moved her, seemed to come and abide about her,—a thought-presence.

And a thought-presence was precisely what it was. A thousand circumstances may stretch that hyphen which at once links and separates the sign-syllables of the wonderful fact; an impossibility, of physical conditions, may be between; but the fact subsists—and in rare moments we know it—when that which belongs to us comes invisibly and takes us to itself; when we feel the footsteps afar off which may or may not be feet of the flesh turned toward us. Yet even this conjunction does happen, now and again; the will—the blessed purpose—is accomplished at once on earth and in heaven.

When many minutes after the city bells had ceased to sound for nine o'clock, the bell of her own door rang with a clear, strong stroke, Desire Ledwith thought instantly of Mr. Kirkbright with a singular recall,—that was less a change than a transfer of the same perception,—from the inward to the actual. She had no reason to suppose it,—no ordinary reason why,—but she was suddenly persuaded that the friend who in the last hour had stood spiritually beside her, stood now, in reality, upon her door-stone.

She did not even wonder for what he could have come. She did not move from her chair; she did not lift her crossed hands from off her open book. She did not break the external conditions in which unseen forces had been acting. If she had moved,—pushed back her chair,—put by her book,—it would have begun to seem strange, she would have been back in a bond of circumstance which would have embarrassed her; she would have been receiving an evening call at an unusual hour. But to have the verity come in and fill the dream,—this was not strange. And yet Christopher Kirkbright had scarcely been in that house ten times before.

She heard him ask if Miss Ledwith were still below; if he might see her. She heard Frendely close the outer door, and precede him toward the door of the library. He entered, and she lifted her eyes.

"Don't move," he said quickly. "I have been seeing you sitting like that, all the evening. It is a reverie come true. Only I have walked out of my end of it, and into yours. May I stay a little while?"

Her face answered him in a very natural way. There was a wonder in her eyes, and in the smile that crept over her lips; there were wonder and waiting in the silence which she kept, answering in her face only, at the first, that peculiar greeting. Perhaps any woman, who had had no dream, would have found other response as difficult.

"I am going back to Brickfields to-morrow. I am more eager than ever to get the home finished there, for those who are waiting for its shelter. I have had a busy day,—a busy evening; it has not been a still reverie in which I have seen you. In this last half hour, I have been with Vireo. He has found a woman for me who can be a directress of work; can manage the sewing-room. A good woman, too, who will mother—not 'matron'—the girls. I have bought five machines. They will make their own garments first; then they will work for pay, some hours each day, or a day or two every week,—in turn. That money will be their own. The rest of the time will be due to the commonwealth. There will be a farm-kitchen, where they will cook—and learn to cook well—for the farm hands; they will wash and iron; they will take care of fruit and poultry. As they learn the various employments, they will take their place as teachers to new-comers; we shall keep them busy, and shall make a life around them, that will be worth their laboring for; as God makes all the beauty of the world for us to live in, in compensation for the little that He leaves it needful for us to do. There is where I think our privilege comes in, after the similitude of his; to supplement broadly that which shall not hinder honest and conditional exertion. I have been longing to tell you about it; I have had a vision of you in the midst of my work and talk; I have had a feeling of you this evening, waiting just so and there; I had to come. I went to see your Mary Moxall, Miss Desire."

"In the midst of all you had to do!"

"Was it not a part? 'All in the day's work' is a good proverb."

"What did you say to her?"

"I asked her if she would come up into the country with my sister, to a home among great, still, beautiful hills, and take care of her baby, and some flowers."

"It was like asking her to come home—to God!"

"Yes,—I think it was asking her God's way. How can we, standing among all the helps and harmonies of our lives, ask them to come straight up to Him,—His invisible unapproachable Self,—out of the terrible darkness and chaos of theirs? There are no steps."

"Tell me more about the steps you have been making—in the hills. You said 'flowers.'"

"Yes; there will be a conservatory. I must have them all the year through; the short summer gardening would not be ministry enough. Beyond the Chapel Rock runs back a large new wing, with sewing and living rooms; they only wait good weather for finishing. A dozen women can live and work there. As they grow fit and willing, and numerous enough to colonize off, there are little houses to be built that they can move into, set up homes, earn their machines, and at last, in cases where it proves safe and wise, their homes themselves. I shall provide a depot for their needlework in the city; and as the village grows it will create a little demand of its own. Mr. Thayne is going to build the cottages, and he and I have contracted for the seven miles of railroad to Tillington, as a private enterprise. The brickmaking is to begin at once; we shall do something for the building of the new, fire-proof Boston. Your thought is growing into a fact, Miss Desire; and I think I have not forgotten any particular of it. Now, I have come back to you for more,—a great deal more, if I can get it. First, a name. We can't call it a City of Refuge, beautiful as such a city is—to be. Neither will I call it a Home, or an Asylum. The first thing Mary Moxall said to me was,—'I won't go to no Refuges nor Sile'ums. I don't want to be raked up, mud an' all, into a heap that everybody knows the name of. If the world was big enough for me to begin again,—in a clean place; but there ain't no clean places!' And then I asked her to come home with me and my sister."

"You mean, of course, a neighborhood name, for the settlement, as it grows?"

"Exactly. 'Brickfield Farms' belongs to the outlying husbandry and homesteads. And 'Clay Pits!' It is out of the pit and the miry clay that we want to bring them. The suggestion of that is too much like Mary Moxall's 'heap that everybody knows the name of.'"

"Why not call it 'Hill-hope'? 'The hills, whence cometh our strength;' 'the mountain of the height of Israel where the Lord will plant it, and the dry tree shall flourish'?"

"Thank you," said Mr. Kirkbright, heartily. "That is the right word. It is named."

Desire said nothing. She looked quietly into the fire with a flush of deep pleasure on her face. Mr. Kirkbright remained silent also for a few minutes.

He looked at her as she sat there, in this room that was her own; that was filled with home-feeling and association for her; where a solemnly tender commission and opportunity had been given her, and had centred, and he almost doubted whether the thing that was urging itself with him to be asked for last and greatest of all, were right to ask; whether it existed for him, and a way could be made for it to be given him. Yet the question was in him, strong and earnest; a question that had never been in him before to ask of any woman. Why had it been put there if it might not at least be spoken? If there were not possibly, in this woman's keeping, the ordained and perfect answer?

While he sat and scrupled about it, it sprang, with an impulse that he did not stop to scruple at, to his lips.

"I shall want to ask you questions every day, dear friend! What are we to do about it?"

Desire's eyes flashed up at him with a happiness in them that waited not to weigh anything; that he could not mistake. The color was bright upon her cheek; her lips were soft and tremulous. Then the eyes dropped gently away again; she answered nothing,—with words.

So far as he had spoken, she had answered.

"I want you there, by my side, to help me make a real human home around which other homes may grow. There ought to be a heart in it, and I cannot do it alone. Could you—will you—come? Will you be to me the one woman of the world, and out of your purity and strength help me to help your sisters?"

He had risen and walked the few steps across the distance that was between them. He stopped before her, and bending toward her, held out his hands.

Desire stood up and laid hers in them.

"It must be right. You have come for me. I cannot possibly do otherwise than this."

The deep, gracious, divine fact had asserted itself. A house here, or a house there could not change or bind it. They belonged together. There was a new love in the world, and the world would have to arrange itself around it. Around it and the Will that it was to be wedded to do.

They stood together, hands in hands. Christopher Kirkbright leaned over and laid his lips against her forehead.

He whispered her name, set in other syllables that were only for him to say to her. I shall not say them over on this page to you.

But there is a line in the blessed Scripture that we all know, and God had fulfilled it to his heart.

Strangely—more strangely than any story can contrive—are the happenings of life put side by side.

As they sat there a little longer in the quiet library, forgetting the late evening hour, because it was morning all at once to them; forgetting Sylvie Argenter and her mother as they were at just this moment in the next room; only remembering them among those whom this new relation and joining of purpose must make surer and safer, not less carefully provided for in the changes that would occur,—the door of the gray parlor opened; a quick step fell along the passage, and Sylvie unlatched the library door, and stood in the entrance wide-eyed and pale.

"Desire! Come!"

"Sylvie! What, dear?" cried Desire, quickly, as she sprang to meet her, her voice chording responsive to Sylvie's own, catching in it the indescribable tone that tells so much more than words. She did not need the further revelation of her face to know that something deep and strange had happened.

Sylvie said not a syllable more, but turned and hurried back along the hall.

Desire and Mr. Kirkbright followed her.

Mrs. Argenter was sitting in the deep corner of her broad, low sofa, against the two large pillows.

"A minute ago," said Sylvie, in the same changed voice, that spoke out of a different world from the world of five minutes before, "she was here! She gave me her plate to put away on the sideboard, and now,—when I turned round,"—

She was There.

The plate, with its bits of orange-rind, and an untasted section of the fruit, stood upon the sideboard. The book she had been reading fifteen minutes since lay, with her eye-glasses inside it, at the page where she had stopped, upon the couch; her left hand had fallen, palm upward, upon the cushioned seat; her life had gone instantly and without a sign, out from her mortal body.

Mrs. Argenter had died of that disease which lets the spirit free like the uncaging of a bird.

Hypertrophy of the heart. The gradual thickening and hardening of those mysterious little gates of life and the walls in which they are set; the slower moving of them on their palpitating hinges, till a moment comes when they open or close for the last time, and in that pause ajar the soul flits out, like some curious, unwary thing, over a threshold it may pass no more again, forever.



CHAPTER XXXII.

EASTER LILIES.

Bright, soft days began to come; days in which windows stood open, and pots of plants were set out on the window-sills; days alternating as in the long, New England spring they always do, with bleak intervals of sharp winds and cold sea-storms; yet giving sweet anticipation tenderly, as a mother gives beforehand that which she cannot find in her heart to keep back till the birthday. That is the charm of Nature with us; the motherliness in her that offsets, and breaks through with loving impulse, her rule of rigidness. The year comes slowly to its growth, but she relaxes toward it with a kind of pity, and says, "There, take this! It isn't time for it, but you needn't wait for everything till you're grown up!"

People feel happy, in advance of all their hopes and realizations, on such days; the ripeness of the year, in whatever good it may be making for them, touches them like the soft air that blows up from the south. There is a new look on men's and women's faces as you meet them in the street; a New Jerusalem sort of look; the heavens are opened upon them, and the divineness of sunshine flows in through sense and spirit.

Sylvie Argenter was very peaceful. She told Desire that she never would be afraid again in all her life; she knew how things were measured, now. She was "so glad the money had almost all been spent while mother lived; that not a dollar that could buy her a comfort had been kept back."

She was quite content to stay now; at least till Rachel Froke should come; she was busily helping Desire with her wedding outfit. She was willing to receive from her the fair wages of a seamstress, now that she could freely give her time, and there was no one to accept and use an invalid's expensive luxuries.

Desire would not have thought it needful that hundreds of extra yards of cambric and linen should be made up for her, simply because she was going to be married, if it had not been that her marriage was to be so especially a beginning of new life and work, in which she did not wish to be crippled by any present care for self.

"I see the sense of it now, so far as concerns quantity; as for quality, I will have nothing different from what I have always had."

There was no trousseau to exhibit; there were only trunks-full of good plenishing that would last for years.

Sylvie cut out, and parceled. Elise Mokey, and one or two other girls who had had only precarious employment and Committee "relief" since the fire, had the stitching given them to do; and every tuck and hem was justly paid for. When the work came back from their hands, Sylvie finished and marked delicately.

She had the sunny little room, now, over the gray parlor, adjoining Desire's own. The white box lay upon a round, damask-covered-stand in the corner, under her mother's picture painted in the graceful days of the gray silks and llama laces; and around this, drooping and trailing till they touched the little table and veiled the box that held the beautiful secret,—seeming to say, "We know it too, for we are a part,"—wreathed the shining sprays of blossomy fern.

In these sunny days of early spring, Sylvie could not help being happy. The snows were gone now, except in deep, dark places, out of the woods; the ferns and vines and grasses were alive and eager for a new summer's grace and fullness; their far-off presence made the air different, already, from the airs of winter.

Yet Rodney Sherrett had kept silence.

All these weeks had gone by, and Miss Euphrasia had had no answer from over the water. Of all the letters that went safely into mail bags, and of all the mail bags that went as they were bound, and of all the white messages that were scattered like doves when those bags were opened,—somehow—it can never be told how,—that particular little white, folded sheet got mishandled, mislaid, or missent, and failed of its errand; and at the time when Miss Euphrasia began to be convinced that it must be so, there came a letter from Mr. Sherrett to herself, written from London, where he had just arrived after a visit to Berlin.

"I have had no family news," he wrote, "of later date than January 20th. Trust all is well. Shall sail from Liverpool on the 9th."

The date of that was March 20th.

The fourteenth of April, Easter Monday, was fixed for Desire Ledwith's marriage.

Rachel Froke came back on the Friday previous. Desire would have her in time, but not for any fatigues.

The gray parlor was all ready; everything just as it had been before she left it. The ivies had been carefully tended, and the golden and brown canary was singing in his cage. There was nothing to remind of the different life to which, the place had been lent, making its last hours restful and pleasant, or of the death that had stepped so noiselessly and solemnly in.

Desire had formally made over this house to her cousin and co-heiress, Hazel Ripwinkley.

"It must never be left waiting, a mere possible convenience, for anybody," she said. "There must be a real life in it, as long as we can order it so."

The Ripwinkleys were to leave Aspen Street, and come here with Hazel. Miss Craydocke, who never had half room enough in Orchard Street, was to "spill over" from the Bee-hive into the Mile-hill house. "She knew just whom to put there; people who would take care and comfort. Them shouldn't be any hurt, and there would be lots of help."

There was a widow with three daughters, to begin with; "just as neat as a row of pins;" but who had had less and less to be neat with for seven years past; one of the daughters had just got a situation as compositor, and another as a book-keeper; between them, they could earn twelve hundred dollars a year. The youngest had to stay at home and help her mother do the work, that they might all keep together. They could pay three hundred dollars for four rooms; but of course they could not get decent ones, in a decent neighborhood, for that. That was what Bee-hives were for; houses that other people could do without.

Hazel had her wish; it came to pass that they also should make a bee-hive.

"And whenever I marry," Hazel said, "I hope he won't be building a town of his own to take me to; for I shall have to bring him here. I'm the last of the line."

"That will all be taken care of as the rest has been. There isn't half as much left for us to manage as we think," said Desire, putting back into the desk the copy of Uncle Titus's will which they had been reading over together. "He knew the executorship into which he gave it."

Shall I stop here with them until the Easter tide, and finish telling you how it all was?

There is a little bit about Bel Bree and Kate Sencerbox and the Schermans, which belongs somewhat earlier than that,—in those few pleasant days when March was beguiling us to believe in the more engaging of his double moods, and in the possibility of his behaving sweetly at the end, and going out after all like a lamb.

We can turn back afterwards for that. I think you would like to hear about the wedding.

Does it never occur to you that this "going back and living up" in a story-book is a sign of a possibility that may be laid by in the divine story-telling, for the things we have to hurry away from, and miss of, now? It does to me. I know that That can manage at least as well as mine can.

* * * * *

Christopher Kirkbright and Desire Ledwith were married in the library, where they had betrothed themselves; where Desire had felt all the sacredness of her life laid upon her; where she took up now another trust, that was only an outgrowth and expansion of the first, and for which she laid down nothing of its spirit and intent.

Mrs. Ledwith and the sisters—Mrs. Megilp and Glossy—were there, of course.

Mrs. Megilp had said over to herself little imaginary speeches about the homestead and old associations, and "Daisy's great love and reverence for all that touched the memory of her uncle, to whom she certainly owed everything;" about the journey to New York, and the few days they had to give there to Mr. Oldway's life-long friend and Desire's adviser, Mr. Marmaduke Wharne ("Sir Marmaduke he would be, everybody knew, if he had chosen to claim the English title that belonged to him"),—who was too infirm to come on to the wedding; and the necessity there was for them to go as fast as possible to their estate in the country,—Hill-hope,—where Mr. Kirkbright was building "mills and a village and a perfect castle of a house, and a private railroad and heaven knows what,"—all this to account, indirectly, for the quiet little ordinary ceremony, which of course would otherwise have been at the Church of the Holy Commandments; or at least up-stairs in the long, stately old drawing-room which was hardly ever used.

But none of the people were there to whom any such little speeches had to be made; nobody who needed any accounting to for its oddity was present at Desire Ledwith's wedding.

Mr. Vireo officiated; there was something in his method and manner which Mrs. Megilp decidedly objected to.

It was "everyday," she thought. "It didn't give you a feeling of sanctity. It was just as if he was used to the Almighty, and didn't mind! It seemed as if he were just mentioning things, in a quiet way, to somebody who was right at his elbow. For her part, she liked a little lifting up."

Hazel Ripwinkley heard her, and told Sylvie and Diana that "that came of having all your ideas of home in the seventh story; of course you wanted an elevator to go up in."

Desire Ledwith looked what she was, to-day; a grand, pure woman; a fit woman to stand up beside a man like Christopher Kirkbright, in fair white garments, and say the words that made her his wife. There was a beautiful, sweet majesty in her giving of herself.

She did not disdain rich robes to-day,—she would give herself at her very best, with all generous and gracious outward sign.

She wore a dress of heavy silk, long-trained; the cream-white folds, unspoiled by any frippery of lace, took, as they dropped around her, the shade and convolutions of a lily. Upon her bosom, and fastening her veil, were deep green leaves that gave the contrast against which a lily rests itself. Around her throat were links of frosted silver, from which hung a pure plain silver cross; these were the gift of Hazel. The veil, of point, and rarely beautiful, fell back from her head,—lovely in its shape, and the simple wreathing of the dark, soft hair,—like a drift of water spray; not covering or misting her all over,—only lending a touch of delicate suggestion to the pure, cool, graceful, flower-like unity of her whole air and apparel.

"Desire is beautiful!" said Hazel Ripwinkley to her mother. "She never stopped to be pretty!"

White calla-lilies, with their tall stems and great shadowy leaves, were in the Pompeiian vases on the mantel; in the India jars in the corners below; in a large Oriental china bowl that was set upon the closed desk on the library table, wheeled back for the first time that anybody there had seen it so, against the wall.

Hazel had hung a lily-wreath upon the carved back of Uncle Titus's chair, that no one might sit down in it, and placed it in the recess at Desire's left hand, as she should stand up to be married.

"Will you two take each other, to love and dwell together, and to do God's work, as He shall show and help you, so long as He keeps you both in this his world? Will you, Desire Ledwith, take Christopher Kirkbright to be your wedded husband; will you, Christopher Kirkbright, take Desire Ledwith to be your wedded wife; and do you thereto mutually make your vows in the sight of God and before this company?"

And they answered together, "We do."

It was a promise for more than each other; it was a life-consecration. It was a gathering up and renewal of all that had been holy in the resolves of either while they had lived apart; a joining of two souls in the Lord.

Hilary Vireo would not have dared to lead to perjury, by such words, a common man and woman. It was enough for such to ask if they would take, and keep to, each other.

Mrs. Megilp thought it was "so jumbled!" "If it was her daughter, she should not think she was half married."

Mrs. Megilp put it more shrewdly than she had intended.

Desire and Christopher Kirkbright were very sure they had not been "half married." It was not the world's half marriage that they had stood up there together for.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

KITCHEN CRAMBO.

Elise Mokey and Mary Pinfall came in one evening to see Bel Bree and Kate.

There had been company to tea up-stairs, and the dishes were more than usual, and the hour was a little later.

Kate was putting up the last of the cooking utensils, and scalding down the big tin dish-pan and the sink. Bel was up-stairs.

A table with a fresh brown linen cloth upon it, two white plates and cups, and two white napkins, stood out on the kitchen floor under the gas-light. The dumb-waiter came rumbling down, with toast dish, tea and coffee pots, oyster dish and muffin plate. Several slices of cream toast were left, and there was a generous remnant of nicely browned scalloped oysters. The half muffins, buttered hot, looked tender and tempting still.

Kate removed the dishes, sent up the waiter, and producing some nice little stone-ware nappies hot from the hot closet, transferred the food from the china to these, laying it neatly together, and replaced them in the closet, to wait till Bel should come. The tea and coffee she poured into small white pitchers, also hot in readiness, and set them on the range corner. Then she washed the porcelain and silver in fresh-drawn scalding water, wiped and set them safely on the long, white sideboard. There they gleamed in the gas-light, and lent their beauty to the brightness of the room, just as much as they would have done in actual using.

"But what a lot of trouble!" said Elise Mokey.

"Half a dozen dishes?" returned Kate. "Just three minutes' work; and a warm, fresh supper to make it worth while. Besides rubbing the silver once in four weeks, instead of every Friday. A Yankee kitchen is a labor-saving institution, Mrs. Scherman says."

Down came the waiter again, and down the stairs came Bel. Kate brought two more cups and plates and napkins.

"Now, girls, come and take some tea," she said, drawing up the chairs.

Mrs. Scherman was not strict about "kitchen company." She gave the girls freely to understand that a friend or two happening in now and then to see them, were as welcome to their down-stairs table as her own happeners in were to hers. "I know it is just the cosiness and the worth-while of home and living," she said. "And I'll trust the 'now and then' of it to you."

The hint of reasonable limit, and the word of trust, were better than lock and law.

"How nice this is!" said Mary Pinfall, as Bel put a hot muffin, mellow with sweet butter, upon her plate.

"If Matilda Meane only knew which side—and where—bread was buttered! She's living on 'relief,' yet; and she buys cream-cakes for dinner, and peanuts for tea! But, Bel, what were you up-stairs for? I thought you was queen o' the kitchen!"

"Kate gives me her chance, sometimes. We change about, to make things even. The best of it is in the up-stairs work, and waiting at table is the first-best chance of all. You see, you 'take it in at the pores,' as the man says in the play."

"Tea and oysters?" said Elise, with an exclamatory interrogation.

"You know better. See here, Elise. You don't half believe in this experiment, though you appreciate the muffins. But it isn't just loaves and fishes. There's a living in the world, and a way to earn it, besides clothes, and bread and butter. If you want it, you can choose your work nearest to where the living is. And wherever else it may or mayn't be, it is in houses, and round tea-tables like this."

"Other people's living,—for you to look at and wait on," said Elise. "I like to be independent."

"They can't keep it back from us, if they wanted to," said Bel. "And you can't be independent; there's no such thing in the world. It's all give and take."

"How about 'other folks' dust,' Kate? Do you remember?"

"There's only one place, I guess, after all," said Kate, "where you can be shut up with nothing but your own dust!"

"Sharper than ever, Kate Sencerbox! I guess you do get rubbed up!"

"Mr. Stalworth is there to-night," said Bel. "He tells as good stories as he writes. And they've been talking about Tyndall's Essays, and the spectroscope. Mrs. Scherman asked questions that I don't believe she'd any particular need of answers to, herself; and she stopped me once when I was going out of the room for something. I knew by her look that she wanted me to hear."

"If they want you to hear, why don't they ask you to sit down and hear comfortably?" said Elise Mokey, who had got her social science—with a little warp in it—from Boffin's Bower.

"Because it's my place to stand, at that time," said Bel, stoutly; "and I shouldn't be comfortable out of my place. I haven't earned a place like Mrs. Scherman's yet, or married a man that has earned it for me. There are proper things for everybody. It isn't always proper for Mrs. Scherman to sit down herself; or for Mr. Scherman to keep his hat on. It's the knowing what's proper that sets people really up; it never puts them down!"

"There's one thing," said Kate Sencerbox. "You might be parlor people all your days, and not get into everybody's parlor, either. There's an up-side and a down-side, all the way through, from top to bottom. The very best chance, for some people, if they only knew it, into some houses, would be up through the kitchen."

"Never mind," said Bel, putting sugar into Mary Pinfall's second cup of coffee. "I've got the notion of those lines, Kate,—I was going to tell you,—into my head at last, I do believe. Red-hot iron makes a rainbow through a prism, like any light; but iron-steam stops a stripe of the color; and every burning thing does the same way,—stops its own color when it shines through its own vapor; there! Let's hold on to that, and we'll go all over it another time. There's a piece about it in last month's Scribner."

"What are you talking about?" said Elise Mokey.

"The way they've been finding out what the sun is made of. By the black lines across the rainbow colors. It's a telegraph; they've just learned to read it."

"But what do you care?"

"I guess it's put there as much, for me as anybody," said Bel. "I don't think we should ever pick up such things, though, among the basting threads at Fillmer & Bylles'. They're lying round here, loose; in books and talk, and everything. They're going to have Crambo this evening, Kate. After these dishes are washed, I mean to try my hand at it. They were laughing about one Mrs. Scherman made last time; they couldn't quite remember it. I've got it. I picked it up among the sweepings. I shall take it in to her by and by."

Bel went to her work-basket as she spoke, and lifting up some calico pieces that lay upon it, drew from underneath two or three folded bits of paper.

"This is it," she said, selecting one, and coming back and reading.

(Do you see, let me ask in a hurried parenthesis,—how the tone of this household might easily have been a different one, and pervaded differently its auxiliary department? How, in that case, it might have been nothing better than a surreptitious scrap of silk or velvet, that would have lain in Bel Bree's work-basket, with a story about it of how, and for what gayety, it had been made; a scrap out of a life that these girls could only gossip and wonder about,—not participate, and with self-same human privilege and faculty delight in; and yet the only scrap that—"out of the sweepings"—they could have picked up? There is where, if you know it, dear parlor people, the up-side, by just living, can so graciously and generously be always helping the down.)

Bel read:—

"'What of that second great fire that was prophesied to come before Christmas?'—'Peaches.'"

"You've got to get that word into the answer, you see and it hasn't the very least thing to do with it! Now see:—

'A prophet, after the event, No startling wisdom teaches; A second fire would scarce be sent To gratify the morbid bent That for fresh horror reaches. But, friend, do tell me why you went And mixed it up with peaches!'

It's great fun! And sometimes it's lovely, real poetry. Kate, you've got to give me some words and questions, I'm going to take to Crambo."

"You'll have to mix it up with dish-washing," said Elise. "Dish-washing and dust,—you can't get rid of them!"

"We do, though!" said Kate, alertly, jumping up and beginning to fetch the plates and cups from the dumb-waiter. "Here, Bel!" And she tossed three or four long, soft, clean towels over to her from the shelf beside the china.

"And about that dusting," she went on, after the noise of the hot water rushing from the faucet was over, and she began dropping the things carefully down through the cloud of steam into the great pan full of suds, and fishing them up again with a fork and a little mop,—"about the dusting, I didn't finish. It's a work of art to dust Mrs. Scherman's parlor. Don't you think there's a pleasure in handling and touching up and setting out all those pretty things? Don't they get to be a part of our having, too? Don't I take as much comfort in her fernery as she does? I know every little green and woolly loop that comes up in it. It's the only sense there is in things. There's a picture there, of cows coming home, down a green lane, and the sun striking through, and lighting up the gravel, and a patch of green grass, and the red hair on the cows' necks. You think you just catch it coming, suddenly, through the trees, when you first look up at it. And you go right into a little piece of the country, and stand there. Mr. Scherman doesn't own that lane, or those cows, though he bought the picture. All he owns is what he gets by the signs; and I get that, every day, for the dusting! There are things to be earned and shared where people live, that you can't earn in the sewing-shops."

"That's what Bel said. Well, I'm glad you like it. Sha'n't I wipe up some of those cups?"

"They're all done now," said Bel, piling them together.

In fifteen minutes after their own tea was ended, the kitchen was in order again; the dumb-waiter, with its freight, sent up to the china closet; the brown linen cloth and the napkins folded away in the drawer, and the white-topped table ready for evening use. Bel Bree had not been brought up in a New England farm-house, and seen her capable stepmother "whew round," to be hard put to it, now, over half a dozen cups and tumblers more or less.

"We must go," said Elise Mokey. "I've got the buttons to sew on to those last night-gowns of Miss Ledwith's. I want to carry them back to-morrow."

"You're lucky to sew for her," said Bel. "But you see we all have to do for somebody, and I'd as lief it would be teacups, for my part, as buttons."

Bel Bree's old tricks of rhyming were running in her head. This game of Crambo—a favorite one with the Schermans and their bright little intimate circle—stirred up her wits with a challenge. And under the wits,—under the quick mechanic action of the serving brain,—thoughts had been daily crowding and growing, for which these mere mental facilities were waiting, the ready instruments.

I have said that Bel Bree was a born reformer and a born poet; and that the two things go together. To see freshly and clearly,—to discern new meaning in old living,—living as old as the world is; to find by instinct new and better ways of doing, the finding of which is often only returning to the heart and simplicity of the old living before it was old with social circumventions and needed to be fresh interpreted; these are the very heavenly gift and office of illumination and leadership. Just as she had been made, and just where she had been put,—a girl with the questions of woman-life before her in these days of restless asking and uncertain reply,—with her lot cast here, in this very crowding, fermenting, aspiring, great New England metropolis, in the hour of its most changeful and involved experience,—she brought the divine talisman of her nature to bear upon the nearest, most practical point of the wide tangle with which it came in contact. And around her in this right place that she had found and taken, gathered and wrought already, by effluence and influence, forces and results that gather and work about any nucleus of life, however deep hidden it may be in a surrounding deadness. All things,—creation itself,—as Asenath had said, must begin in spots; and she and Bel Bree had begun a fair new spot, in which was a vitality that tends to organic completeness, to full establishment, and triumphant growth.

Upon Bel herself reflected quickly and surely the beneficent action of this life. She was taking in truly, at every pore. How long would it have been before, out of the hard coarse limits in which her one line of labor and association had first placed her, she would have come up into such an atmosphere as was here, ready made for her to breathe and abide in? To help make also; to stand at its practical mainspring, and keep it possible that it should move on.

The talk, the ideas of the day, were in her ears; the books, the periodicals of the day were at hand, and free for her to avail herself of. The very fun at Mrs, Scherman's tea-table was the sort of fun that can only sparkle out of culture. There was a grace that her aptness caught, and that was making a lady of her.

"I'll give in," said Elise Mokey, "that you're getting style; though I can't tell how it is either. It ain't in your calico dresses, nor the doing up of your hair."

Perhaps it was a good deal in the very simplifying of these from the exaggerated imitations of the shop and street, as well as in the tone of all the rest with which these inevitably fell into harmony.

But I want to tell you about Bel's kitchen Crambo. I want to show you how what is in a woman, in heart and mind, springs up and shows itself, and may grow to whatever is meant for it, out of the quietest background of homely use.

She brought out pencil and paper, and made Kate write question slips and detached words.

"I feel just tingling to try," she said. "There's a kind of dancing in my head, of things that have been there ever so long. I believe I shall make a poem to-night. It's catching, when you're predisposed; and it's partly the spring weather, and the sap coming up. 'Put a name to it,' Katie! Almost anything will set me off."

Kate wrote, on half a dozen scraps; then tossed them up, and pushed them over for Bel to draw.

"How do you like the city in the spring?" was the question; and the word, suggested by Kate's work at the moment, was,—"Hem."

Bel put her elbows on the table, and her hands up against her ears. Her eyes shone, as they rested intent upon the two penciled bits. The link between them suggested itself quickly and faintly; she was grasping at an elusive something with all the fine little quivering brain-tentacles that lay hold of spiritual apprehension.

Just at that moment the parlor bell rang.

"I'll go," she said. "You keep to your sewing. It's for the nursery, I guess, and I'll do my poem up there."

She caught up pencil and paper, and the other fragment also,—Mrs. Scherman's own rhyme about the "peaches."

Mrs. Scherman met her at the parlor door.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you," she said; "but the baby is stirring. Could you, or Kate, go up and try to hush her off again? If I go, she'll keep me."

"I will," said Bel. "Here is that 'Crambo' you were talking of at tea, Mrs. Scherman. I kept it. Kate picked it up with the scraps."

"O, thank you! Why, Bel, how your face shines!"

Bel hurried off, for Baby Karen "stirred" more emphatically at this moment. Asenath went back into the parlor.

"Here is that rhyme of mine, Frank, that you were asking for. Bel found it in the dust-pan. I believe she's writing rhymes herself. She tries out every idea she picks up among us. She had a pencil in her hand, and her face was brimful of something. Mr. Stalworth, if I find anything in the dust-pan, I shall turn it over to you. 'First and Last' is bound to act up to its title, and transpose itself freely, according to Scripture."

"'First and Last' will receive, under either head, whatever you will indorse, Mrs. Scherman,—and the last not least,"—returned the benign and brilliant editor.

Bel had a knack with a baby. She knew enough to understand that small human beings have a good many feelings and experiences precisely like those of large ones. She knew that if she woke up in the night, she should not be likely to fall asleep again if pulled up out of her bed into the cold; nor if she were very much patted and talked to. So she just took gently hold of the upper edge of the small, fine blanket in which Baby Karen was wrapped, and by it drew her quietly over upon her other side. The little limbs fell into a new place and sensation of rest, as larger limbs do; little Karen put off waking up and crying for one delicious instant, as anybody would; and in that instant sleep laid hold of her again. She was safe, now, for another hour or two, at least.

Mrs. Scherman said she had really never had so little trouble with a baby as with this one, who had nobody especially appointed to make out her own necessity by constant "tending."

Bel did not go down-stairs again. She could do better here than with Kate sitting opposite, aware of all her scratches and poetical predicaments.

An hour went by. Bel was hardly equal yet to five-minute Crambo; and besides, she was doing her best; trying to put something clearly into syllables that said itself, unsyllabled, to her.

She did not hear Mrs. Scherman when she came up the stairs. She had just read over to herself the five completed stanzas of her poem.

It had really come. It was as if a violet had been born to actual bloom from the thought, the intangible vision of one. She wondered at the phrasing, marveling how those particular words had come and ranged themselves at her call. She did not know how she had done it, or whether she herself had done it at all. She began almost to think she must have read it before somewhere. Had she just picked it up out of her memory? Was it a borrowing, a mimicry, a patchwork?

But it was very pretty, very sweet! It told her own feelings over to her, with more that she had not known she had felt or perceived. She read it again from beginning to end in a whisper. Her mouth was bright with a smile and her eyes with tears when she had ended.

Asenath Scherman with her light step came in and stood beside her.

"Won't you tell me?" the sweet, gracious voice demanded.

Bel Bree looked up.

"I thought I'd try, in fun," she said, "and it came in real earnest."

Asenath forgot that the face turned up to hers, with the smile and the tears and the color in it, was the face of her hired servant. A lovely soul, all alight with thought and gladness, met her through it.

She bent down and touched Bel's forehead with her lady-lips.

Bel put the little scribbled paper in her hand, and ran away, up-stairs.

"Will you give it to me, Bel, and let me do what I please with it?"—Mrs. Scherman went to Bel and asked next day.

Bel blushed. She had been a little frightened in the morning to think of what had happened over night. She could not quite recollect all the words of her verses, and she wondered if they were really as pretty as she had fancied in the moment of making them.

All she could answer was that Mrs. Scherman was "very kind."

"Then you'll trust me?"

And Bel, wondering very much, but too shy to question, said she would.

A few days after that, Asenath called her up-stairs. The postman had rung five minutes before, and Kate had carried up a note.

"We were just in time with our little spring song," she said. "Bluebirds have to sing early; at least a month beforehand. See here! Is this all right?" and she put into Bel's hand a little roughish slip of paper, upon which was printed:—

"THE CITY IN SPRING.

"It is not much that makes me glad: I hold more than I ever had. The empty hand may farther reach, And small, sweet signs all beauty teach.

"I like the city in the spring, It has a hint of everything. Down in the yard I like to see The budding of that single tree.

"The little sparrows on the shed; The scrap of soft sky overhead; The cat upon the sunny wall; There's so much meant among them all.

"The dandelion in the cleft A broken pavement may have left, Is like the star that, still and sweet, Shines where the house-tops almost meet.

"I like a little; all the rest Is somewhere; and our Lord knows best How the whole robe hath grace for them Who only touch the garment's hem."

At the bottom, in small capitals, was the signature,—BEL BREE.

"I don't understand," said Bel, bewildered. "What is it? Who did it?"

"It is a proof," said Mrs. Scherman. "A proof-sheet. And here is another kind of proof that came with it. Your spring song is going into the May number of 'First and Last.'"

Mrs. Scherman reached out a slip of paper, printed and filled in.

It was a publisher's check for fifteen dollars.

"You see I'm very unselfish, Bel," she said. "I'm going to work the very way to lose you."

Bel's eyes flashed up wide at her.

The way to lose her! Why, nobody had ever got such a hold upon her before! The printed verses and the money were wonderful surprises, but they were not the surprise that had gone straight into her heart, and dropped a grapple there. Mrs. Scherman had believed in her; and she had kissed her. Bel Bree would never forget that, though she should live to sing songs of all the years.

"When you can earn money like this, of course I cannot expect to keep you in my kitchen," said Mrs. Scherman, answering her look.

"I might never do it again in all my life," sensible Bel replied. "And I hope you'll keep me somewhere. It wouldn't be any reason, I think, because one little green leaf has budded out, for a plant to say that it would not be kept growing in the ground any longer. I couldn't go and set up a poem-factory, without a home and a living for the poems to grow up out of. I'm pleased I can write!" she exclaimed, brimming up suddenly with the pleasure she had but half stopped to realize. "I thought I could. But I know very well that the best and brightest things I've ever thought have come into my head over the ironing-board or the bread-making. Even at home. And here,—why, Mrs. Scherman, it's living in a poem here! And if you can be in the very foundation part of such living, you're in the realest place of all, I think. I don't believe poetry can be skimmed off the top, till it has risen up from the bottom!"

"But you ought to come into my parlor, among my friends! People would be glad to get you into their parlors, by and by, when you have made the name you can make. I've no business to keep you down. And you don't know yourself. You won't stay."

"Just please wait and see," said Bel. "I haven't a great deal of experience in going about in parlors; but I don't think I should much like it,—that way. I'd rather keep on being the woman that made the name, than to run round airing it. I guess it would keep better."

"I see I can't advise you. I shouldn't dare to meddle with inspirations. But I'm proud, and glad, Bel; and you're my friend! The rest will all work out right, somehow."

"Thank you, dear Mrs. Scherman," said Bel, her voice full of feeling. "And—if you please—will you have the grouse broiled to-day, or roasted with bread-sauce?"

At that, the two young women laughed out, in each other's faces.

Bel stopped first.

"It isn't half so funny as it sounds," she said. "It's part of the poetry; the rhyme's inside; it is to everything. We're human people: that's the way we get it."

And Bel went away, and stuffed the grouse, and grated her bread-crumbs, and sang over her work,—not out loud with her lips, but over and over to a merry measure in her mind,—

"Everything comes to its luck some day: I've got chickens! What will folks say?"

"I'm solving more than I set out to do," Sin Scherman said to her husband. "Westover was nothing to it. I know one thing, though, that I'll do next."

"One thing is reasonable," said Frank. "What is it?"

"Take her to York with us, this summer. Row out on the river with her. Sit on the rocks, and read and sew, and play with the children. Show her the ocean. She never saw it in all her life."

"How wonderful is 'one thing' in the mind of a woman! It is a germ-cell, that holds all things."

"Thank you, my dear. If I weren't helping you to soup, I'd get up and make you a courtesy. But what a grand privilege it is for a man to live with a woman, after he has found that out! And how cosmical a woman feels herself when her capacity is recognized!"

Mrs. Scherman has told her plan to Bel. Kate also has a plan for the two summer months in which the household must be broken up.

"I mean to see the mountains myself," she said, boldly. "I don't see why I shouldn't go to the country. There are homes there that want help, as well as here. I can get my living where the living goes. That's just where it fays in, different from other work. Bel knows places where I could get two dollars a week just for a little helping round; or I could even afford to pay board, and buy a little time for resting. I shall have clothes to make, and fix over. It always took all I could earn, before, to keep me from hand to mouth. I never saw six months' wages all together, in my life. I feel real rich."

"I will pay you half wages for the two months," said Mrs. Scherman, "if you will come back to me in September. And next year, if we all keep together, it will be your turn, if you like, to go with me."

Kate feels the spring in her heart, knowing that she is to have a piece of the summer. The horse-chestnut tree in the yard is not a mockery to her. She has a property in every promise that its great brown buds are making.

"The pleasant weather used to be like the spring-suits," she said. "Something making up for other people. Nothing to me, except more work, with a little difference. Now, somewhere, the hills are getting green for me! I'm one of the meek, that inherit the earth!"

"You are earning a whole living," Bel said, reverting to her favorite and comprehensive conclusion.

"And yet,—somebody has got to run machines," said Kate.

"But all the bodies haven't. That is the mistake we have been making. That keeps the pay low, and makes it horrid. There's a little more room now, where you and I were. Anyhow, we Yankee girls have a right to our turn at the home-wheels. If we had been as cute as we thought we were, we should have found it out before."

Bel Bree has written half a dozen little poems at odd times, since the rhyme that began her fortune. Mr. Stalworth says they are stamped with her own name, every one; breezy, and freshly delicious. For that very reason, of course, people will not believe, when they see the name in print, that it is a real name. It is so much easier to believe in little tricks of invention, than in things that simply come to pass by a wonderful, beautiful determination, because they belong so. They think the poem is a trick of invention, too. They think that of almost everything that they see in print. Their incredulity is marvelously credulous! There is no end to that which mortals may contrive; but the limit is such a measurable one to that which can really be! We slip our human leash so easily, and get outside of all creation, and the "Divinity that shapes our ends," to shape and to create, ourselves!

For my part, the more stories I write out, the more I learn how, even in fiction, things happen and take relation according to some hidden reality; that we have only to stand by, and see the shiftings and combinings, and with what care and honesty we may, to put them down.

If there is anything in this story that you cannot credit,—if you cannot believe in such a relation, and such a friendship, and such a mutual service, as Asenath Scherman's and Bel Bree's,—if you cannot believe that Bel Bree may at this moment be ironing Mrs. Scherman's damask table-cloths, and as the ivy leaf or morning-glory pattern comes out under the polish, some beautiful thought in her takes line and shade under the very rub of labor, and shows itself as it would have done no other way, and that by and by it will shine on a printed page, made substantive in words,—then, perhaps, you have only not lived quite long—or deep—enough. There is a more real and perfect architecture than any that has ever got worked out in stone, or even sketched on paper.

Neither Boston, nor the world, is "finished" yet. There may be many a burning and rebuilding, first. Meanwhile, we will tell what we can see.

And that word sends me back to Bel herself, of whom this present seeing and telling can read and recite no further.

Are you dissatisfied to leave her here? Is it a pity, you think, that the little glimmer of romance in Leicester Place meant nothing, after all? There are blind turns in the labyrinth of life. Would you have our Bel lost in a blind turn?

The right and the wrong settled it, as they settle all things. The right and the wrong are the reins with which we are guided into the very best, sooner or later; yes,—sooner and later. If we will go God's way, we shall have manifold more in this present world, and in the world to come life everlasting.



CHAPTER XXXIV.

WHAT NOBODY COULD HELP.

Mr. and Mrs. Kirkbright went away to New York on the afternoon of their marriage.

Miss Euphrasia went up to Brickfields. Sylvie Argenter was to follow her on Thursday. It had been settled that she should remain with Desire, who, with her husband, would reach home on Saturday.

It was a sweet, pleasant spring day, when Sylvie Argenter, with some last boxes and packages, took the northward train for Tillington.

She was going to a life of use and service. She was going into a home; a home that not only made a fitting place for her in it, and was perfect in itself, but that, with noble plan and enlargement, found way to reach its safety and benediction, and the contagion of its spirit, over souls that would turn toward it, come under its rule, and receive from it, as their only shelter and salvation; over a neighborhood that was to be a planting of Hope,—a heavenly feudality.

Sylvie's own dreams of a possible future for herself were only purple lights upon a far horizon.

It seemed a very great way off, any bringing to speech and result the mute, infrequent signs of what was yet the very real, secret strength and joy and hope of her girl's heart.

She had a thought of Rodney Sherrett that she was sure she had a right to. That was all she wanted, yet. Of course, Rodney was not ready to marry; he was too young; he was not much older than she was, and that was very young for a man. She did not even think about it; she recognized the whole position without thinking.

She remembered vividly the little way-station in Middlesex, where he had bought the ferns, that day in last October; she thought of him as the train ran slowly alongside the platform at East Keaton. She wondered if he would not sometimes come up for a Sunday; to spend it with his uncle and his Aunt Euphrasia. It was a secret gladness to her that she was to be where he partly, and very affectionately, belonged. She was sure she should see him, now and then. Her life looked pleasant to her, its current setting alongside one current, certainly, of his.

She sat thinking how he had come up behind her that day in the drawing-room car, and of all the happy nonsense they had begun to talk, in such a hurry, together. She was lost in the imagination of that old surprise, living it over again, remembering how it had seemed when she suddenly knew that it was he who touched her shoulder. Her thought of him was a backward thought, with a sense in it of his presence just behind her again, perhaps, if she should turn her head,—which she would not do, for all the world, to break the spell,—when suddenly,—face to face,—through the car-window, she awoke to his eyes and smile.

"How did you know?" she asked, as he came in and took the seat beside her. Then she blushed to think what she had taken for granted.

"I didn't," he answered; "except as a Yankee always knows things, and a cat comes down upon her feet. I am taking a week's holiday, and I began it two days sooner, that I might run up to see Aunt Effie before I go down to Boston to meet my father. The steamer will be due by Saturday. It is my first holiday since I went to Arlesbury. I'm turning into a regular old Gradgrind, Miss Sylvie."

Sylvie smiled at him, as if a regular old Gradgrind were just the most beautiful and praiseworthy creature a bright, hearty young fellow could turn into.

"You'd better not encourage me," he said, shaking his head. "It would be a dreadful thing if I should get sordid, you know. I'm not apt to stop half way in anything; and I'm awfully in earnest now about saving up money."

He had to stop there. He was coming close to motives, and these he could say nothing about.

But a sudden stop, in speech as in music, is sometimes more significant than any stricken note.

Sylvie did not speak at once, either. She was thinking what different reasons there might be, for spending or saving; how there might be hardest self-denial in most uncalculating extravagance.

When she found that they were growing awkwardly quiet, she said,—"I suppose the right thing is to remember that there is neither virtue nor blame in just saving or not saving."

"My father lost a good deal by the fire," said Rodney. "More than he thought, at first. He is coming home sooner, in consequence. I'm very glad I did not go abroad. I should have been just whirled out of everything, if I had. As it is, I'm in a place; I've got a lever planted. It's no time now for a fellow to look round for a foothold."

"You like Arlesbury?" asked Sylvie. "I think it must be a lovely place."

"Why?" said Rodney, taken by surprise.

"From the piece of it you sent me in the winter."

"Oh! those ferns? I'm glad you liked them. There's something nice and plucky about those little things, isn't there?"

It was every word he could think of to reply. He had a provoked perception that was not altogether nice and plucky, of himself, just then. But that was because the snow was still unlifted from him. He was under a burden of coldness and constraint. Somebody ought to come and take it away. It was time. The spring, that would not be kept back, was here.

He had not said a word to Sylvie about her mother. How could he speak of what had left her alone in the world, and not say that he wanted to make a new world for her? That he had longed for it through all her troubles, and that this, and nothing else, was what he was keeping his probation for?

So they came to Tillington at last, and there had been between them only little drifting talk of the moment, that told nothing.

After all, do we not, for a great part, drift through life so, giving each other crumbs off the loaf that will only seem to break in that paltry way? And by and by, when the journey is over, do we not wonder that we could not have given better and more at a time? Yet the crumbs have the leaven and the sweetness of the loaf in them; the commonest little wayside things are charged full of whatever is really within us. God's own love is broken small for us. "This is my Body, broken for you."

If life were nothing but what gets phrased and substanced, the world might as well be rolled up and laid away again in darkness.

Sylvie had a handful of checks; Rodney took them from her, and went out to the end of the platform to find the boxes. Two vehicles had been driven over from Hill-hope to meet her; an open spring-wagon for the luggage, and a chaise-top buggy to convey herself.

Trunks, boxes, and the great padlocked basket were speedily piled upon the wagon; then the two men who had come jumped up together to the front seat of the same, and Sylvie saw that it was left for her and Rodney to proceed together for the seven-mile drive.

Rodney came back to her with an alert and felicitous air. How could he help the falling out of this? Of course he could not ride upon the wagon and leave a farm-boy to charioteer Sylvie.

"Shall you be afraid of me?" he asked, as he tossed in his valise for a footstool, and carefully bestowed Sylvie's shawl against the back, to cushion her more comfortably. "Do you suppose we can manage to get over there without running down a bake-shop?"

"Or a cider-mill," said Sylvie, laughing. "You will have to adapt your exploits to circumstances."

Up and down, through that beautiful, wild hill-country, the brown country roadway wound; now going straight up a pitch that looked as perpendicular as you approached it as the side of a barn; then flinging itself down such a steep as seemed at every turn to come to a blank end, and to lead off with a plunge, into air; the water-bars, ridged across at rough intervals, girding it to the bosom of the mountain, and breaking the accelerated velocity of the descending wheels. Sylvie caught her breath, more than once; but she did it behind shut lips, with only a dilatation of her nostrils. She was so afraid that Rodney might think she doubted his driving.

The woods were growing tender with fretwork of swelling buds, and beautiful with bright, young hemlock-tips; there was a twittering and calling of birds all through the air; the first little breaths and ripples of spring music before the whole gay, summer burst of song gushed forth.

The fields lay rich in brown seams, where the plough had newly furrowed them. Farmers were throwing in seed of barley and spring wheat. The cattle were standing in the low sunshine, in barn-doors and milking-yards. Sheep were browsing the little buds on the pasture bushes.

The April day would soon be over. To-morrow might bring a cold wind, perhaps; but the winter had been long and hard; and after such, we believe in the spring pleasantness when it comes.

"What a little way brings us into a different world!" said Sylvie as they rode along. "Just back there in the city, you can hardly believe in these hills."

Her own words reminded her.

"I suppose we shall find, sometime," she said gently, "that the other world is only a little way out."

"I've been very sorry for you, Sylvie," said Rodney. "I hope you know that."

His slight abruptness told her how the thought had been ready and pressing for speech, underneath all their casual talk.

And he had dropped the prefix from her name.

He had not meant to, but he could not go back and put it on. It was another little falling out that he could not help. The things he could not help were the most comfortable.

"Mother would have had a very hard time if she had lived," said Sylvie. "I am glad for her. It was a great deal better. And it came so tenderly! I had dreaded sickness and pain for her."

"It has been all hard for you. I hope it will be easier now. I hope it will always be easier."

"I am going to live with Mrs. Kirkbright," said Sylvie.

"Tell me about my new aunt," said Rodney.

Sylvie was glad to go on about Desire, about the wedding, about Hill-hope, and the plans for living there.

"I think it will be almost like heaven," she said. "It will be home and happiness; all that people look forward to for themselves. And yet, right alongside, there will be the work and the help. It will open right out into it, as heaven does into earth. Mr. Kirkbright is a grand man."

"Yes. He's one of the ten-talent people. But I suppose we can all do something. It is good to have some little one-horse teams for the light jobs."

"I never could be Desire," said Sylvie. "But I am glad, to work with her. I am glad to live one of the little lives."

There would always be a boy and girl simpleness between these two, and in their taking of the world together. And that is good for the world, as well. It cannot be all made of mountains. If all were high and grand, it would be as if nothing were. Heaven itself is not built like that.

"There goes some of Uncle Christopher's stuff, I suppose," said Rodney, a while afterward, as they came to the top of a long ascent. He pointed to a great loaded wain that stood with its three powerful horses on the crest of a forward hill. It was piled high up with tiling and drain-pipe, packed with straw. The long cylinders showed their round mouths behind, like the mouths of cannon.

"A nice cargo for these hills, I should think."

"They have brakes on the wheels, of course," said Sylvie. "And the horses are strong. That must be for the new houses. They will soon make all those things here. Mr. Kirkbright has large contracts for brick, already. He has been sending down specimens. They say the clay is of remarkably fine quality."

"We shall have to get by that thing, presently," said Rodney. "I hope the horse will take it well."

"Are you trying to frighten me?" asked Sylvie, smiling. "I'm used to these roads. I have spent half a summer here, you know."

But Rodney knew that it was the "being used" that would be the question with the horse. He doubted if the little country beast had ever seen drain-pipe before. He had once driven Red Squirrel past a steam boiler that was being transported on a truck. He remembered the writhe with which the animal had doubled himself, and the side spring he had made. It was growing dusk, now, also. They were not more than a mile from Brickfield Basin, and the sun was dropping behind the hills.

"I shall take you out, and lead him by," he said. "I've no wish to give you another spill. We won't go on through life in that way."

It was quite as well that they had only another mile to go. Rodney was keeping his promise, but the thread of it was wearing very thin.

They rode slowly up the opposite slope, then waited, in their turn, on the top, to give the team time to reach the next level.

They heard it creak and grind as it wore heavily down, taking up the whole track with careful zigzag tackings; they could see, as it turned, how the pole stood sharp up between the shoulders of the straining wheel horses, as their haunches pressed out either way, and their backs hollowed, and their noses came together, and the driver touched them dexterously right and left upon their flanks to bring them in again.

"Uncle Kit has a good teamster there," said Rodney.

Just against the foot of the next rise, they overtook him. The gray nag that Rodney drove pricked his ears and stretched his head up, and began to take short, cringing steps, as they drew near the formidable, moving mass.

Rodney jumped out, and keeping eye and hand upon him, helped down Sylvie also. Then he threw the long reins over his arm, and took the horse by the bridle.

The animal made a half parenthesis of himself, curving skittishly, and watching jealously, as he went by the frightsome pile.

"You see it was as well not to risk it," Rodney said, as Sylvie came up with him beyond. "He would have had us down there among the blackberry vines. He's all right now. Will you get in?"

"Let us walk on to the top," said Sylvie. "It is so pleasant to feel one's feet upon the ground."

They kept on, accordingly; the slow team rumbling behind them. At the top, was a wide, beautiful level; oak-trees and maples grew along the roadside, and fields stretched out along a table land to right and left. Before them, lying in the golden mist of twilight, was a sea of distant hill-tops,—purple and shadow-black and gray. The sky bent down its tender, mellow sphere, and touched them softly.

Sylvie stood still, with folded hands, and Rodney stopped the horse. A rod or two back, just at the edge of the level, the loaded wagon had stopped also.

"Hills,—and the sunset,—and stillness," said Sylvie. "They always seem like heaven."

Rodney stood with his right hand, from which fell the looped reins, reached up and resting on the saddle.

"I never saw a sight like that before," he said.

While they looked, the evening star trembled out through the clear saffron, above the floating mist that hung among the hills.

"O, they never can help it!" exclaimed Sylvie, suddenly.

"Help it? Who?" asked Rodney, wondering.

"Beginning again. Growing good. Those people who are coming up to Hill-hope. There's a man coming, with his wife; a young man, who got into bad ways, and took to drinking. Mr. Vireo has been watching and advising him so long! He married them, five years ago, and they have two little children. The wife is delicate; she has worried through everything. She has taken in working-men's washing, to earn the rent; and he had a good trade, too; he was a plasterer. He has really tried; but it was no use in the city; it was all around him. And he lost character and chances; the bosses wouldn't have him, he said. When he was trying most, sometimes, they wouldn't believe in him; and then there would come idle days, and he would meet old companions, and get led off, and then there would be weeks of misery. Now he is coming away from it all. There is a little cottage ready, with a garden; the little wife is so happy! He can't get it here; and he will have work at his trade, and will learn brickmaking. Do you know, I think a place like this, where such work is doing, is almost better than heaven, where it is all done, Rodney!"

She spoke his name, as he had hers a little while ago, without thinking. He turned his face toward her with a look which kindled into sudden light at that last word, but which had warmed all through before with the generous pathos of what she told him, and the earnest, simple way of it.

"I've found out that even in our own affairs, making is better than ready-made," he said. "This last year has been the best year of my life. If my father had given me fifty thousand dollars, and told me I might—have all my own way with it,—I shouldn't have thanked him as much to-day, as I do. But I wish that steamer were in, and he were here! He has got something which belongs to me, and I want him to give it back."

After enunciating this little riddle, Rodney changed hands with his reins, and faced about toward the vehicle, reaching his other to Sylvie.

"You had better jump in," he said; and there was a tone and an inflection at the pause, as if another word, that would have been tenderly spoken, hung refrained upon it. "We must get well ahead of that old catapult."

They drove on rapidly along the level; then they came to the long, gradual slope that brought them down into Brickfields.

To the right, just before reaching the Basin, a turn struck off that skirted round, partly ascending again until it fell into the Cone Hill road and so led direct to Hill-hope.

They could see the buildings, grouped picturesquely against rocks and pines and down against the root of the green hill. They had all been painted of a light gray or slate color, with red roofs.

They passed on, down into the shadows, where trees were thick and dark. A damp, rich smell of the woods was about them,—a different atmosphere from the breath of the hill-top. They heard the tinkle of little unseen streams, and the far-off, foaming plunge of the cascades.

Suddenly, there came a sound behind them like the rush of an avalanche; a noise that seemed to fill up all the space of the air, and to gather itself down toward them on every side alike.

"O, Rodney, turn!" cried Sylvie.

But there was a horrible second in which he could not know how to turn.

He did not stop to look, even. He sprang, with one leap, he knew not how,—over step or dasher,—to the horse's head. He seized him by the bridle, and pulled him off the road, into a thicket of bush-branches, in a hollow rough with stones.

The wheels caught fast; Rodney clung to the horse, who tried to rear; Sylvie sat still on the seat sloped with the sharp cant of the half-overturned vehicle.

There was only a single instant. Down, with the awful roar of an earthquake, came crashing swift and headlong, passing within a hand's breadth of their wheel, the enormous, toppling, loaded team; its three strong horses in a wild, plunging gallop; heels, heads, haunches, one dark, frantic, struggling tumble and rush. An instant more, of paralyzed breathlessness, and then a thundering fall, that made the ground quiver under their feet; then a stillness more suddenly dreadful than the noise. A great cloud of dust rose slowly up into the air, and showed dimly in the dusky light.

The gray horse quieted, cowed by the very terror and the hush. Sylvie slipped down from the tilting buggy, and found her feet upon a stone.

Rodney reached out one hand, and she came to his side. He put his arm around her, and drew her close.

"My darling little Sylvie!" he said.

She turned her face, and leaned it down upon his shoulder.

"O, Rodney, the poor man is killed!"

But as they stood so, a figure came toward them, over the high water-bar below which they had stopped.

"For God's sake, is anybody hurt?" asked a strange, hoarse voice with a tremble in it.

"Nobody!"

"O, are you the driver? I thought you must be killed! How thankful!"—And Sylvie sobbed on Rodney's shoulder.

"Can I help you?" asked the man.

"No, look after your horses." And the man went on, down into the dust, where the wreck was.

"We'll go, and send help to you," shouted Rodney.

Then he backed the gray horse carefully out upon the road again.

"Will you dare get in?" he asked of Sylvie.

"I do not think we had better. How can we tell how it is down there? We may not be able to pass."

"It is below the turn, I think. But come,—we'll walk."

He took the bridle again, and gave his other hand to Sylvie. Holding each other so, they went along.

When they came to the turn, they could see, just beyond the mass of ruin; the great wagon, three wheels in the air,—one rolled away into the ditch; the broken freight, flung all across the road, and lying piled about the wagon. One horse was dead,—buried underneath. Another lay motionless, making horrid moans. The teamster was freeing the third—the leader, which stood safe—from chains and harness.

Leading him, the man came up with Rodney and Sylvie, as they turned into the side road.

"I knew you were just ahead, when it happened. I thought you were gone for certain."

"There was a Mercy over us all!" said Sylvie, with sweet, tremulous intenseness.

The rough man lifted his hand to his bare head. Rodney clasped tighter the little fingers that lay within his own.

"What did happen?" he asked.

"The brake-rod broke; the pole-strap gave way; it was all in a heap in a minute. I saw it was no use; I had to jump. And then I thought of you. I'm glad you saw me, sir. You know I was sober."

"I know you were sober, and managing most skillfully. I had been saying that."

"Thank you, sir. It's an awful job."

"Hark!" said Sylvie. "There's the man with the trunks."

"I forgot all about him," said Rodney.

"That's a fact," said the teamster. "Turn down here, to let him by. Hallo!"

"Hallo! Come to grief?"

"We just have, then. Go ahead, will you, and bring back—something to shoot with," he added, in a lower tone, and coming close,—remembering Sylvie. "I had a crow-bar, but it's lost in the jumble. I'll stay here, now."

The wagon drove by, rapidly. The man led his horse down by the wall, to wait there. Sylvie and Rodney, hand in hand, walked on.

Sylvie shivered with the horrible excitement; her teeth chattered; a nervous trembling was taking hold of her.

Rodney put his arm round her again. "Don't tremble, dear," he said.

"O, Rodney! What were we kept alive for?"

"For each other," whispered Rodney.



CHAPTER XXXV.

HILL-HOPE.

They were sitting together, the next day, on the rock below the cascade, in the warm sunshine.

Aunt Euphrasia knew all about it; Aunt Euphrasia had let them go down there together. She was as content as Rodney in the thing that could not now be helped.

"I've broken my promise," said Rodney to Sylvie. "I agreed with my father that I wouldn't be engaged for two years."

"Why, we aren't engaged,—yet,—are we?" asked Sylvie, with bewitching surprise.

"I don't know," said Rodney, his old, merry, mischievous twinkle coming in the corners of his eyes, as he flashed them up at her. "I think we've got the refusal of each other!"

"Well. We'll keep it so. We'll wait. You shall not break any promise for me," said Sylvie, still sweetly obtuse.

"I'm satisfied with that way of looking at it," said Rodney, laughing out. "Unless—you mean to be as cunning about everything else, Sylvie. In that case, I don't know; I'm afraid you'd be dangerous."

"I wonder if I'm always going to be dangerous to you," said Sylvie, gravely, taking up the word. "I always get you into an accident."

"When we take matters quietly, the way they were meant to go, we shall leave off being hustled, I suppose," said Rodney, just as gravely. "There has certainly been intent in the way we have been—thrown together!"

"I don't believe you ought to say such things, Rodney,—yet! You are talking just as if"—

"We weren't waiting. O, yes! I'm glad you invented that little temporary arrangement. But it's a difficult one to carry out. I shall be gladder when my father comes. I'm tired of being Casabianca. I don't see how we can talk at all. Mayn't I tell you about a little house there is at Arlesbury, with a square porch and a three-windowed room over it, where anybody could sit and sew—among plants and things—and see all up and down the road, to and from the mills? A little brown house, with turf up to the door-stone, and only a hundred dollars a year? Mayn't I tell you how much I've saved up, and how I like being a real working man with a salary, just as you liked being one of the Other Girls?"

"Yes; you may tell me that; that last," said Sylvie, softly. "You may tell me anything you like about yourself."

"Then I must tell you that I never should have been good for anything if it hadn't been for you."

"O, dear!" said Sylvie. "I don't see how we can talk. It keeps coming back again. I've had all those plants kept safe that you sent me, Rodney," she began, briskly, upon a fresh tack.

"Those very ivies? Ah, the little three-windowed room!"

"Rodney! I didn't think you were so unprincipled!" said Sylvie, getting up. "I wouldn't have come down here, if I had known there was a promise! I shall certainly help you keep it. I shall go away."

She turned round, and met a gentleman coming down along the slope of the smooth, broad rock.

"Mr. Sherrett!—Rodney!"

Rodney sprang to his feet.

"My boy! How are you?"

"Father! When—how—did you come?"

"I came to Tillington by the late train last night, and have just driven over. I went to Arlesbury yesterday."

"But the steamer! She wasn't due till Sunday. You sailed the ninth?"

"No. I exchanged passages with a friend who was detained in London. I came by the Palmyra. But you don't let me speak to Sylvie."

He pronounced her name with a kind emphasis; he had turned and taken her hand, after the first grasp of Rodney's.

"Father, I've broken my promise; but I don't think anybody could have helped it. You couldn't have helped it yourself."

"I've seen Aunt Euphrasia. I've been here almost an hour. I have thanked God that nothing is broken but the promise, Rodney; and I think the term of that was broken only because the intent had been so faithfully kept. I'm satisfied with one year. I believe all the rest of your years will be safer and better for having this little lady to promise to, and to help you keep your word."

And he bent down his splendid gray head, with the dark eyes looking softly at her, and kissed Sylvie on the forehead.

Sylvie stood still a moment, with a very lovely, happy, shy look upon her downcast face; then she lifted it up quickly, with a clear, earnest expression.

"I hope you think, Mr. Sherrett,—I hope you feel sure,"—she said, "that I wouldn't have been engaged to Rodney while there was a promise?"

"Not more than you could possibly help," said Mr. Sherrett, smiling.

"Not the very least little bit!" said Sylvie, emphatically; and then they all three laughed together.

* * * * *

I don't know why everything should have happened as it did, just in these few days; except—that this book was to be all printed by the twenty-third of April, and it all had to go in.

That very afternoon there came a letter to Miss Euphrasia from Mr. Dakie Thayne.

He had found Mr. Farron Saftleigh in Dubuque; he had pressed him close upon the matter of his transactions with Mrs. Argenter; he had obtained a hold upon him in some other business that had come to his knowledge in the course of his inquiries at Denver: and the result had been that Mr. Farron Saftleigh had repurchased of him the railroad bonds and the deeds of Donnowhair land, to the amount of five thousand dollars; which sum he inclosed in his own cheek payable to the order of Sylvia Argenter.

Knowing, morally, some things that I have not had opportunity to investigate in detail, and cannot therefore set down as verities,—I am privately convinced that this little business agency on the part of Dakie Thayne, was—in some proportion at least,—a piece of a horse-shoe!

If you have not happened to read "Real Folks," you will not know what that means. If you have, you will now get a glimpse of how it had come to Ruth and Dakie that their horse-shoe,—their little section of the world's great magnet of loving relation,—might be made. Indeed, I do know, and can tell you, the very words Ruth said to Dakie one day when they had been married just three weeks.

"I've always thought, Dakie, that if ever I had money,—or if ever I came to advise or help anybody who had, and who wanted to do good with it,—that there would be one special way I should like to take. I should like to sit up in the branches, and shake down fruit into the laps of some people who never would know where it came from, and wouldn't take it if they did; though they couldn't reach a single bough to pick for themselves. I mean nice, unlucky people; people who always have a hard time, and need to have a good one; and are obliged in many things to pretend they do. There are a good many who are willing and anxious to help the very poor, but I think there's a mission waiting for somebody among the pinched-and-smiling people. I've been a Ruth Pinch myself, you see; and I know all about it, Mr. John Westlock!"

So I know they looked about for crafty little chances to piece out and supplement small ways and means; to put little traps of good luck in the way for people to stumble upon,—and to act the part generally of a human limited providence, which is a better thing than fairy godmothers, or enchanted cats, or frogs under the bridge at the world's end, in which guise the gentle charities clothed themselves in the old elf fables, that were told, I truly believe, to be lived out in real doing, as much as the New Testament Parables were. And a great deal of the manifold responsibility that Mr. Dakie Thayne undertakes, as broker or agent in the concerns of others, is undertaken with a deliberate ulterior design of this sort. I think Mr. Farron Saftleigh probably was made to pay about three thousand dollars of the sum he had wheedled Mrs. Argenter out of. Dakie Thayne makes things yield of themselves as far as they will; he brings capacity and character to bear upon his ends as well as money; he knows his money would not last forever if he did not.

Mr. Sherrett and Rodney stayed at Hill-hope over the Sunday. Mr. and Mrs. Kirkbright arrived on Saturday morning.

There was a first home-service in the Chapel-Room that looked out upon the Rock, and into which the conservatory already gave its greenness and sweetness, that first Sunday after Easter.

Christopher Kirkbright read the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the day; the Prayer, that God "who had given his only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification, would grant them so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that they might always serve Him in pureness and truth"; the Assurance of "the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith in the Son of God," who came "not by water only, but by water and blood"; and that "the spirit and the water and the blood agree in one,"—in our redemption; the Story of that First Day of the week, when Jesus came back to his disciples, after his resurrection, and said, "Peace be unto you," showing them his hands and his side.

THE END