s grown up wonderfully pretty."

"She is no more to be compared to you, than--well, never mind," said
Mrs. Thayer. "I hope we shall see more of them at Christmas. Talk of
eyes,--Mr. St. Leger's eyes are beautiful. Did you notice them?"

Dolly on her side had seen the party descend the rocks, looking after
them with an odd feeling or mixture of feelings. The meeting with her
school friend had brought up sudden contrasts never so sharply
presented to her before. The gay carelessness of those old times, the
warm shelter of her Aunt Hal's home, the absolute trust in her father
and mother,--where was all that now? Dolly saw Christina's placid
features and secure gaiety, saw her surrounded and sheltered by her
parents' arms, strong to guard and defend her; and she seemed to
herself lonely. It fell to her to guard and defend her mother; and her
father? what was he about?--There swept over her an exceeding bitter
cry of desolateness, unuttered, but as it were the cry of her whole
soul; with again that sting of pain which seemed unendurable, how can a
father let his child be ashamed of him! She turned away that St. Leger
might not see her face; she felt it was terribly grave; and betook
herself now to the examination of the church.

And the still beauty and loftiness of the place wrought upon her by and
by with a strange effect. Wandering along among pillars and galleries
and arcades, where saints and apostles and martyrs looked down upon her
as out of past ages, she seemed to be surrounded by a "great cloud of
witnesses." They looked down upon her with grave, high sympathy, or
they looked up with grave, high love and trust; they testified to work
done and dangers met, and suffering borne, for Christ,--and to the
glory awaiting them, and to which they then looked forward, and which
now they had been enjoying--how long? What mattered the little troubled
human day, so that heaven's long sunshine set in at the end of it? And
that sun "shall no more go down." Dolly roved on and on, going from one
to another sometimes lovely sometimes stern old image; and gradually
she forgot the nineteenth century, and dropped back into the past, and
so came to take a distant and impartial view of herself and her own
life; getting a better standard by which to measure the one and
regulate the other. She too could live and work for Christ. What though
the work were different and less noteworthy; what matter, so that she
were doing what He gave her