pushed away his plate, and went to the window. "Is it not Mrs. Carlyle
who quotes that quaint old story about some one who always thanked God
'for the blessings that passed over his or her head'? Is not that a
curious idea, when one comes to think it out? Fancy thanking heaven
really and seriously for all our disappointed hopes and plans,--for
'the blessings that go over our heads'! It would be a new clause in
our petitions,--eh, Gracie?"

"Why, yes," she replied, as she came and stood near him. "I am afraid
I could never say that from my heart."

"It is not easy," he returned, quietly; "but I do not know that we
ought to give up trying, for all that." And then his manner changed,
and he put his arm round her in his old fashion. "Recollect, I want
you very much, Grace: your coming will make me far happier. Mattie
only touches the outside of things; I want some one near me who can go
deeper than that,--who will help me with real work, and put up with my
bad humors; for I am a man who is very liable to discouragement." And
when he had said this, he bade her good-bye.

It was a comfort to Archie to find himself hard at work again. These
few days of idleness had been irksome to him. Now he could throw
himself without stint or limit into his pastoral labors, walking miles
of country road until he was weary, and planning new outlets for the
feverish activity that seemed to stimulate him to fresh efforts.

People began to talk of the young vicar. His sermons were changed
somehow. There was more in them,--"less of the husk, and more of the
kernel," as Miss Middleton once remarked rather pithily.

They were wonderfully brief discourses; but, whereas they had once
been elegant and somewhat scholarly productions, they were now earnest
and even pungent. If the sentences were less carefully compiled, more
rough-hewn, and deficient in polish, there was matter in them that
roused people and made them think.

"I never could remember Mr. Drummond's sermons before," Dulce once
observed, "but now I can recollect whole sentences quite nicely."

Phillis, to whom she spoke, assented by a nod. If she had chosen, she
could have admitted the fact that she could remember not sentences,
but the entire sermon itself. In secret she marvelled also at the
change.

"He is more earnest," she would say to herself. "He preaches now, not
from the outside, but from the inside of things,--from his own
experience, not from other people's. That makes