walked through the crowded rooms in search of a seat;
"you don't know how I have longed for it ever since I first saw pictures
of yours on these walls. And my longing was trebled when I saw your
glorious Pillar of Cloud, and read all that it was meant to teach."

Elisabeth looked at him slyly through her long eyelashes. "How do you
know what I meant to teach? Perhaps you read your own meanings into it,
and not mine."

Farquhar laughed, and Elisabeth thought he had the most beautiful teeth
she had ever seen. "Perhaps so; but, do you know, Miss Farringdon, I
have a shrewd suspicion that my meanings and yours are the same."

"What meaning did you read into my picture?" asked Elisabeth, with the
dictatorial air of a woman who is accustomed to be made much of and
deferred to, as he found a seat for her in the vestibule, under a
palm-tree.

"I read that there was only one answer to the weary problems of labour
and capital, and masses and classes, and employers and employed, and all
the other difficulties that beset and threaten any great manufacturing
community; and that this answer is to be found to-day--as it was found
by the Israelites of old--in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar
of fire by night, and all of which that pillar is a sign and a
sacrament."

"Yes," replied Elisabeth, and her eyes shone like stars; "I meant all
that. But how clever of you to have read it so correctly!"

"I do not ask if you understood what my picture meant. I know you did;
for it was to you, and women such as you, that I was speaking."

"Yes; I understood it well enough," replied Elisabeth sadly.

"I knew you would."

"Poor little daughters of Philip! How much happier they would have felt
if they had been just the same as all the other commonplace Jewish
maidens, and had lived ordinary women's lives!"

"But how much happier they made other people by their great gift of
interpreting to a tired world the hidden things of God!" replied Cecil,
his face aglow with emotion. "You must never forget that, you women of
genius, with your power of making men better and women brighter by the
messages you bring to them! And isn't it a grander thing to help and
comfort the whole world, than to love, honour, and obey one particular
man?"

"I am not sure. I used to think so, but I'm beginning to have my doubts
about it. One comforts the whole world in a slipshod, sketchy kind of
way; but one could do the particular man thoroughly!"

"And