hing that comes in your way. If the Lord's
got anything bigger to give you, he'll see to it. There's your mother's
mending basket brimful of stockings."

Faith couldn't help laughing. Presently she grew grave again.

"Aunt Henderson," said she, abruptly, "I wish something would happen to
me. I get tired of living sometimes. Things don't seem worth while."

Aunt Henderson bent her head slightly, and opened her eyes wide over the
tops of her glasses.

"Don't say that again," said she. "Things happen fast enough. Don't you
dare to tempt Providence."

"Providence won't be tempted, nor misunderstand," replied Faith, an
undertone of reverence qualifying her girlish repartee. "He knows just
what I mean."

"She's a queer child," said Aunt Faith to herself, afterwards, thinking
over the brief conversation. "She'll be something or nothing, I always
said. I used to think 'twould be nothing."

CHAPTER IV.

GLORY McWHIRK.

"There's beauty waiting to be born,
And harmony that makes no sound;
And bear we ever, unawares,
A glory that hath not been crowned."

Shall I try to give you a glimpse of quite another young life than Faith
Gartney's? One looking also vaguely, wonderingly, for "something to
happen"--that indefinite "something" which lies in everybody's future,
which may never arrive, and yet which any hour may bring?

Very little likelihood there has ever seemed for any great joy to get
into such a life as this has been, that began, or at least has its
earliest memory and association, in the old poorhouse at Stonebury.

A child she was, of five years, when she was taken in there with her
old, crippled grandmother.

Peter McWhirk was picked up dead, from the graveled drive of a
gentleman's place, where he had been trimming the high trees that shaded
it. An unsound limb--a heedless movement--and Peter went straight down,
thirty feet, and out of life. Out of life, where he had a trim,
comfortable young wife--one happy little child, for whom skies were as
blue, and grass as green, and buttercups as golden as for the little
heiress of Elm Hill, who was riding over the lawn in her basket wagon,
when Peter met his death there--the hope, also, of another that was to
come.

Rosa McWhirk and her baby of a day old were buried the week after,
together; and then there was nothing left for Glory and her helpless
grandmother but the poorhouse as a present refuge; and to the one death,
that ends all, and to the ot