es that grown people would be interested in, and love as
they love Tusitala's, but just to be the children's 'tale-teller,' and
to write stories that they would listen to long after I am dead and
gone--why _that_ would be worth living for, even if I never saw the
light again. And godmother thinks I can do it."

"I know you can," assented Lloyd, warmly, "and we'll copy them for you,
and send them away to be put into books."

"Joyce," asked Betty, "would you mind reading that little newspaper
clipping to the girls about the Road of the Loving Heart? I want them to
know about it, too."

She did not know that they had already heard it, listening outside her
door with heavy hearts and troubled faces, and when Joyce had found it
and again read it aloud, she told them the story of the memory road that
she was trying to leave behind her.

"It will be harder to do now that I am blind," she said, at the last,
"for I can't help being a care and a trouble to everybody, everywhere I
go now. But godmother says people won't mind that much if I'll only be
pleasant and cheerful about my misfortune, and not let it cast its
shadow on other lives any more than I can help. I haven't said anything
about it yet to her, but if there is enough money in the bank that papa
left to educate me with, I want to go to a school for the blind and
learn to read those queer raised letters, and to do everything for
myself. Then I'll not be such a trouble to everybody."

"But how can you be cheerful and pleasant, and go on that way for a
whole lifetime?" asked Eugenia, with a shiver. "You may live to be an
old, old woman."

"Oh, Eugenia!" exclaimed Joyce, in a shocked undertone. "Don't remind
the poor little thing of of that."

"I know," answered Betty, her smile all gone now, and her lip trembling.
"Sometimes when I think of that, it's so awful that I can hardly stand
it. But it will be only a day at a time, and if I can manage to get
through them one by one, and keep my courage up to the end, it will be
all right afterward, you know, for there is no night _there_. The nurse
read me that yesterday out of Revelation. That's the only thing that
comforts me sometimes." She repeated it in a soft whisper, turning her
face away: "There'll be _no night there_!"

CHAPTER XV.

"THE ROAD OF THE LOVING HEART."

Joyce sat with her elbows on her dressing-table and her chin in her
hands, gazing thoughtfully into the mirror. She had just come from
Be