er and lower yet, by a thousand
little breaks and plunges, till it came out into a broad meadow
stretch miles and miles away.

"What a hurry it is in, to get down where it is wanted," said
Desire.

She had seated herself beside the curling edge of the swift stream,
where it seemed to trace and keep by its own will its boundary upon
the nearly level rock, and was gazing up where the white radiance
poured itself as if direct from out the blue above.

Mr. Kirkbright stood behind her.

"Most things come to us at last so quietly," he said. "It is good to
feel and see what a rush it starts with,--out of that heart of
heaven."

Desire had not said that; but it was just what she had been feeling.
Eager to get to us; coming in a hurry. Was that God's impulse toward
us?

"Making haste to help and satisfy the world," Mr. Kirkbright said
again.

"A river of clear water of life, coming down out of the throne,"
said Miss Euphrasia. "What a sign it is!"

Mr. Kirkbright walked along the margin of the ledge, farther and
farther down. He tried with his stick some stones that lay across
the current at a narrow point where beneath the opposite cliff it
bent and turned away, losing itself from their sight as they stood
here. Then he sprang across; crept, stooping, along the narrow
foothold under the projecting rock, until he could follow with his
eye the course of the rapid water, falling continually to its lower
level as it sped on and on, all its volume gathered in one deep,
rocky, unchangeable bed.

"What a waiting power!" he exclaimed, springing safely back, and
coming up toward them. "What a stream for mills! And it turns
nothing but the farmers' grists, till it gets to Tillington."

Desire was a very little disappointed at this utilitarianism. She
had been so glad and satisfied with the reading of its type; the
type of its far-back impulse.

"If there had been mills here, we should not have seen that," she
said; forgetting to explain what.

But Christopher Kirkbright knew.

"What was it that we did see?" he asked, coming beside her.

"The gracious hurry," she answered, with a half-vexed surprise in
her eyes.

"And what is the next thing to seeing that? Isn't it to partake? To
be in a gracious hurry also, if we can?"

A smile came up now in Desire's face, and effaced gently the
vexation and the surprise.

"Do you know what a legible face you have?" asked Mr. Kirkbright,
seating himself near her on a step of ro