ate habits and having a healthy-minded male's aversion to
hypocrisy, now went to church with his daughter quite regularly. He felt
that it was a good thing,--the right thing for the girl, in some way
insuring her woman's safety in this wicked world, if not her salvation
in the next.

They made a pretty picture together, father and daughter,--the girl with
the wide blue eyes and open mouth, standing shoulder to shoulder with
the little man, each with one gloved hand grasping an edge of the
hymn-book and singing, Milly in a high soprano,--

"Nearer, my God, to Thee!"

and Horatio, rumbling behind a little uncertainly,--

"Nearer to Thee--to THEE!"

IV

MILLY COMPLETES HER EDUCATION

"Milly," Mrs. Kemp remarked thoughtfully, "aren't you going to complete
your education?"

Milly translated this formidable phrase in a flash,--

"You mean go to school any more? Why should I?"

It was a warm June day. Milly had been reading to Mrs. Kemp, who was
sewing. The book was "Romola." Milly had found quite dull its solid
pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation,
and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling matter farther on
had abandoned the book altogether in favor of talk, which always
interested her more than anything else in the world.

"Why should I go to school?" she repeated.

"You are only sixteen."

"Seventeen--in September," Milly promptly corrected.

Mrs. Kemp laughed.

"I didn't finish school until I was eighteen."

"School is so stupid," Milly sighed, with a little grimace. "I hate
getting things out of books."

She had never been distinguished in school,--far from it. Only by real
labor had she been able to keep up with her classes.

"I guess the schools I went to weren't much good," she added.

She saw herself behind a desk at the high school she had last attended
in St. Louis. In front of her sat a dried, sallow, uncheerful woman of
great age, ready to pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the
jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not
"refined"--she knew that now. No, she did not want any more school of
that sort.... Besides, what use could an education be, if she were not
to teach? And Milly had not the faintest idea of becoming a teacher.

"Do you think a girl needs to know a lot of stuff--stupid things in
books?" she asked.

"Women must have a better education than they once did," Eleanor Kemp
replied with