hing compared with Mother and the exultation that
had so evidently come into her life because out of her love and pain
and sacrifice a soul had come into the world to draw so richly from the
treasures of other hearts and to give so richly back again. There is
no triumph like it, as Mary Alice would perhaps know, some day. A
mother's purest happiness is very like God's own.

But at last the sailing date was close at hand. Mary Alice's heart was
heavy and glad together. "If I could only take you!" she whispered to
her mother.

Mother shook her head. "I wouldn't go and leave your father and the
children," she said. "You go and enjoy it all for me. I like it
better that way."

And so, once more Mary Alice smiled through tear-filled eyes at the
dear faces on the station platform, and was gone again into the big
world beyond her home. But this time what a different girl it was who
went!

X

THE OLD WORLD AND THE KING

They had an unusually delightful voyage. The weather was perfection
and their fellow-voyagers included many persons interesting to talk
with and many others interesting to observe and speculate about.

One particularly charming experience came to Mary Alice through the
Captain's appreciation of her eagerness. Godmother had taught her to
love the stars. As well as they could, in New York where, to most
people, only scraps of sky are visible at a time, they had been wont to
watch with keen interest for the nightly appearance of stars they could
see from their windows or from the streets as they went to and fro.
And when they got aboard ship and had the whole sky to look at, they
revelled in their night hours on the deck, and in picking out the
constellations and their "bright, particular stars." This led the
Captain to tell Mary Alice something of the stars as the sailors'
friends; and she had one of the most memorable evenings of her life
when he explained to her something of the science of navigation and
made her see how their great greyhound of the ocean, just like the
first frail barks of the Tyrians, picked its way across trackless
wastes of sea by the infallible guidance of "the friendly stars." All
this particularly interested Mary Alice because of Some One who lived
much in the open and spent many and many a night on the broad deserts,
looking up at the stars.

They landed at Naples, and lingered a fortnight in that lovely
vicinity; then, up to Rome, to Florence and Venice, to