aul means
answering at all. I wish I'd never asked him to do anything."

"So do I, Pauline. Still it is rather early yet for you to give up
hope. It's hard waiting, I know, dear, but that is something we all
have to learn to do, sooner or later."

"I don't think 'no news is good news,'" Pauline said; then she
brightened. "Oh, Mother Shaw! Suppose the letter is on the way now,
and that Hilary is to have a sea voyage! You'd have to go, too."

"Pauline, Pauline, not so fast! Listen, dear, we might send Hilary out
to The Maples for a week or two. Mrs. Boyd would be delighted to have
her; and it wouldn't be too far away, in case we should be getting her
ready for that--sea voyage."

"I don't believe she'd care to go; it's quieter than here at home."

"But it would be a change. I believe I'll suggest it to her in the
morning."

But when Mrs. Shaw did suggest it the next morning, Hilary was quite of
Pauline's opinion. "I shouldn't like it a bit, mother! It would be
worse than home--duller, I mean; and Mrs. Boyd would fuss over me so,"
she said impatiently.

"You used to like going there, Hilary."

"Mother, you can't want me to go."

"I think it might do you good, Hilary. I should like you to try it."

"Please, mother, I don't see the use of bothering with little half-way
things."

"I do, Hilary, when they are the only ones within reach."

The girl moved restlessly, settling her hammock cushions; then she lay
looking out over the sunny garden with discontented eyes.

It was a large old-fashioned garden, separated on the further side by a
low hedge from the old ivy-covered church. On the back steps of the
church, Sextoness Jane was shaking out her duster. She was old and
gray and insignificant looking; her duties as sexton, in which she had
succeeded her father, were her great delight. The will with which she
sang and worked now seemed to have in it something of reproach for the
girl stretched out idly in the hammock. Nothing more than half-way
things, and not too many of those, had ever come Sextoness Jane's way.
Yet she was singing now over her work.

Hilary moved impatiently, turning her back on the garden and the bent
old figure moving about in the church beyond; but, somehow, she
couldn't turn her back on what that bent old figure had suddenly come
to stand for.

Fifteen minutes later, she sat up, pushing herself slowly back and
forth. "I wish Jane had chosen any other morning to clean th