osy "nubia" that had been her mother's, and she
was dancing in the dining-room, with surprising grace, as Pierrette
might have danced in Carnival, and singing, in a sweet, piping voice, an
incongruous little song:--

O Day of wind and laughter,
A goddess born are you,
Whose eyes are in the morning
Blue--blue!

"I made that up," she had explained, "or I guess mebbe I remembered it
from deep in my skull. I like the feel of it in my mouth when I speak
the words."

I used to think that Miss Liddy was really a less useful citizen than
Ellen. For though Miss Liddy worked painstakingly at her dressmaking,
and even dreamed over it little partial dreams, Ellen, mad or sane, made
a garden, and threw little nosegays over our fences, and exercised a
certain presence, latent in the rest of us, which made us momentarily
gentle and in awe of our own sanity.

When, one spring morning, a week before the Friendship Carnival, she
passed down Daphne Street with her plaintive, musical "Busy, busy,
busy ..." Doctor June and the young Reverend Arthur Bliss sat on Doctor
June's screened-in porch discussing a deficit in the Good Shepherd's
Orphans' Home fund for the fiscal year. Ever since the wreck of the
Through, Friendship had contributed to the support of the Home,--having
first understood then that the Home was its patient pensioner,--and now
it was almost like a compliment that we had been appealed to for help.

Doctor June listened with serene patience to what his visitor would say.

"Tension," said the Reverend Arthur Bliss, squaring his splendid young
shoulders, "tension. Warfare. We, as a church, are enormously equipped.
We have--shall we say?--the helmets of our intelligence and the swords
of our wills. Why, the joy of the fight ought to be to us like that of a
strong man ready to do battle, oughtn't it--oughtn't it?"

Doctor June, his straight white hair outlining his plump pink face,
nodded; but one would have said that it was rather less at the Reverend
Arthur than at his Van Houtii spiraea, which nodded back at him.

"My young friend," said Doctor June, "will you forgive me for saying
that it is fairly amazing to me how the church of God continues to use
the terms of barbarism? We talk of the peace that passeth understanding,
and yet we keep on employing metaphors of blood-red war. What does the
modern church want of a helmet and a sword, if I may ask? Even
rhetorically?"

"The Christian life is an