oulders, and make
herself walk off stoutly in a far and opposite direction, when,
without due need and excuse, she caught herself out in these things?

What wonder that this stood in her way, for very pleasantness, when
Kenneth asked her to come and teach in the school? That she was
ashamed to let herself do a thing--even a good thing, that her life
needed,--when there was this conscious charm in the asking; this
secret thought--that she should walk up home with him every Sunday!

She remembered Agatha and Florence, and she imagined, perhaps, more
than they would really have thought of it at home; and so as they
turned into Shubarton Place,--for he had kept on all the way along
Bridgeley and up Dorset Street with her,--she checked her steps
suddenly as they came near the door, and said brusquely,--

"No, Mr. Kincaid; I can't come to the Mission. I might learn A, and
teach them that; but how do I know I shall ever learn B, myself?"

He had left his question, as their talk went on, meaning to ask it
again before they separated. He thought it was prevailing with her,
and that the help that comes of helping others would reach her need;
it was for her sake he asked it; he was disappointed at the sudden,
almost trivial turn she gave it.

"You have taken up another analogy, Miss Desire," he said. "We were
talking about crumbs and feeding. The five loaves and the five
thousand. 'Why reason ye because ye have no bread? How is it that ye
do not understand?'"

Kenneth quoted these words naturally, pleasantly; as he might quote
anything that had been spoken to them both out of a love and
authority they both recognized, a little while ago.

But Desire was suddenly sharp and fractious. If it had not touched
some deep, live place in her, she would not have minded so much. It
was partly, too, the coming toward home. She had got away out of the
pure, clear spaces where such things seemed to be fit and
unstrained, into the edge of her earth atmosphere again, where,
falling, they took fire. Presently she would be in that ridiculous
pink room, and Glossy Megilp would be chattering about "those lovely
purple poppies with the black grass," that she had been lamenting
all the morning she had not bought for her chip hat, instead of the
pomegranate flowers. And Agatha would be on the bed, in her cashmere
sack, reading Miss Braddon.

"It would sound nice to tell them she was going down to the Mission
School to give out crumbs!"

Besi