rt, but
I'm afraid I'm really not strong enough yet."

"I don't know much about sickness," spoke up Frances firmly, "but if
to sit by the child and give him his medicine regularly is all that is
necessary, I am sure I can do that. I'll come and sit up with Jacky
tonight if you care to have me."

Afterwards, when she and Corona were driving away, she wondered a good
deal at herself. But Corona was so evidently pleased with her offer,
and took it all so much as a matter of course, that Frances had not
the courage to display her wonder. They had their drive through the
great green bowl of the country valley, brimming over with sunshine,
and afterwards Corona made Frances go home with her to tea.

Rev. Elliott Sherwood had got back from his pastoral visitations, and
was training his sweet peas in the way they should go against the
garden fence. He was in his shirt sleeves and wore a big straw hat,
and seemed in nowise disconcerted thereby. Corona introduced him, and
he took Grey Tom away and put him in the barn. Then he went back to
his sweet peas. He had had his tea, he said, so that Frances did not
see him again until she went home. She thought he was a very
indifferent young man, and not half so nice as his sister.

But she went and sat up with Jacky Hart that night, getting to the
Cove at dark, when the sea was a shimmer of fairy tints and the boats
were coming in from the fishing grounds. Jacky greeted her with a
wonderful smile, and later on she found herself watching alone by his
bed. The tiny lamp on the table burned dim, and outside, on the rocks,
there was loud laughing and talking until a late hour.

Afterwards a silence fell, through which the lap of the waves on the
sands and the far-off moan of the Atlantic surges came sonorously.
Jacky was restless and wakeful, but did not suffer, and liked to talk.
Frances listened to him with a new-born power of sympathy, which she
thought she must have caught from Corona. He told her all the tragedy
of his short life, and how bad he felt, about Dad's taking to drink
and Mammy's having to work so hard.

The pitiful little sentences made Frances's heart ache. The maternal
instinct of the true woman awoke in her. She took a sudden liking to
the child. He was a spiritual little creature, and his sufferings had
made him old and wise. Once in the night he told Frances that he
thought the angels must look like her.

"You are so sweet pretty," he said gravely. "I never saw