et,
but she forgot it in following his. Now and then bright days came to
her,--few in number, but absolutely golden, when this dearly-loved
brother came on a brief visit,--when they had snatches of delicious
talk in the empty school-room at the top of the house, or he took her
out with him for a long, quiet walk.

Mrs. Drummond always made some dry sarcastic remark when they came in,
for she was secretly jealous of Archie's affection for Grace. Hers was
rather a monopolizing nature, and she would willingly have had the
first share in her son's affections. It somewhat displeased her to see
him so wrapt up in the one sister to the exclusion of all the others,
as she told him.

"I think you might have asked Matilda or Isabel to accompany you. The
poor girls never see anything of you, Archie," she would say
plaintively to her son. But to Grace she would speak somewhat sharply,
bidding her fulfil some neglected duty, which another could as well
have performed, and making her at once understand by her manner that
she was to blame in leaving Mattie at home.

"Mother," Archibald said to her one day, when she had spoken with
unusual severity, and the poor girl had retreated from the room,
feeling as though she had been convicted of selfishness, "we must
settle the matter about which I spoke to you last night. I have been
thinking about it ever since. Mattie will not do at all. I must have
Grace!"

Mrs. Drummond looked up from her mending, and her thin lips settled
into a hard line that they always took when her mind was made up on a
disagreeable subject. She had a pinafore belonging to Dottie in her
hand; there was a jagged rent in it, and she sighed impatiently as she
put it down; though she was not a woman who shirked any of her
maternal duties, she had often been heard to say that her work was
never done, and that her mending-basket was never empty.

"But if I cannot spare Grace," she said, rather shortly, as she
meditated another lecture to the delinquent Dottie.

"But, mother, you must spare her!" returned her son, eagerly, leaning
his elbow on the mantelpiece, and watching her rapid manipulations
with apparent interest. "Look here; I am quite in earnest. I have set
my heart on having Grace. She is just the one to manage a clergyman's
household. She would be my right hand in the parish."

"She is our right hand too, Archie; but I suppose we are to cut it
off, that it may benefit you and your parish."

Mrs. Drummo