--why, he is only a boy!"

"He is twenty-one and I am eighteen, and he's earning forty dollars a
month in the office and is one of the best stenographers in the State.
We've talked it over, and I wish we could be married to-morrow, so!"
Clara burst out with it all at once, while Bess remarked quietly:--

"Yes, they're real sensible, and I think James is nice; but when I
marry I want more than forty dollars a month for candy alone. And then
he isn't particularly handsome."

"He is too!" cried Clara. "And he's good and brave and splendid, and
I'd rather have him than a thousand such men as Lancey Cummings!
Mother, I don't want money. It hasn't made you happy!"

"Hush, dear!" Mrs. Hardy felt as if a blow had smitten her in the
face. She was silent then.

Clara put her arms around her mother and whispered: "Forgive me,
mother! I didn't mean to hurt you. But I am so unhappy."

Unhappy! And yet the girl was just beginning to blossom out towards
the face of God under the influence of that most divine and tender and
true feeling that ever comes to a girl who knows that a true, brave man
loves her with all his soul. And some people would have us leave this
subject to the flippant novelist instead of treating it as Christ did
when He said, "For this cause [that is, for love] shall a man leave his
father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife."

Mrs. Hardy was on the point of saying something when the sound of
peculiar steps on the stairs was heard, and shortly after Alice pushed
the curtains aside and came in. Alice was the oldest girl in the
family. She was a cripple, the result of an accident when a child, and
she carried a crutch, using it with much skill and even grace. The
minute she entered the room she saw something was happening, but she
simply said:--

"Mother, isn't it a little strange father sleeps so soundly? I went up
to him and spoke to him just now, thinking he was just lying there, and
he didn't answer, and then I saw he was asleep. But I never knew him
to sleep so Sunday night. He usually reads up in the study."

"Perhaps he is sick; I will go and see."

Mrs. Hardy rose and went into the other room; and just then the younger
boy, Will, came downstairs. He said something to his mother as he
passed through the room, carrying one of his books in his hand and then
came in where the girls were.

"Say, Alice, translate this passage for me, will you? Confound the old
Romans anyway! Wha