ut when she reached her mother's side
and saw the yellow, faded presentment, her face flushed crimson, and
with flashing eyes she covered the picture with her hands.

"Why did you keep it? Oh, mother, how could you!"

"Aw, then, Denas, 'twas my only comfort many a day and many a time.
Don't take it away--Denas! Denas!"

"I will not have it in the house--'tis a shame to me; it breaks my
heart; how could you, mother?" and she drew the paper away, and
walking to the fire, threw it upon the coals. It burned slowly,
browning gradually from the dancing feet to the tips of the fingers
meeting above the head.

With a white, sad face she watched it burn to a brown film that the
upward draught of the chimney carried out of her sight. Joan also
watched the immolation, and she was a little angry at it. That picture
of Mademoiselle Denasia was one of Joan's secret idols. No one likes
to watch the destruction of their idols, and Joan was hardly pacified
by the kisses and loving words with which Denas extenuated her act.
For an hour or two she had an air of injury. She had been in the habit
of showing this picture with an air of serious secrecy and with many
sighs to any new acquaintance or strange visitor, and its destruction
really put a stop to this clandestine bit of egotism; for who would
believe such an improbable story without the pictured Denasia to prove
it?

Denas regarded the incident as a happy omen. As she watched the
picture turn to cinder, she buried fathoms deep below the tide of her
present life all the restless, profitless, half-regretful memories it
represented. A word or two said by the preacher the day he visited her
school had clung to her consciousness as a burr clings to wool. They
were speaking of the education necessary for the class of children
gathered there, and Denas, after naming the studies pursued, said:
"They are sufficient for the life before them;" then, with an
involuntary sigh, she added, "It is a very narrow life."

And perhaps the minister had heard something of her story, for he
answered gravely: "God knows just where He wants every soul. That is
the life, that is the school, for that soul, and no life is too
narrow. The humblest will afford

"'The common round, the trivial task
Which furnish all we ought to ask--
Room to deny ourselves.'

Mrs. Tresham, that is the grand lesson we are sent here to learn;
self-denial, as against self-pleasing and self-assertion."

Denas only s