boy, and said to me, 'Forgive
these transports, Miss Warne, but this is food and drink to me. I wish I
could explain it to you so that you might rejoice over it with me. Some
day I will, when we are not so busy.' I hope he will. There's enough
that I do understand to make me interested."

"I see you are--and rejoice, my Georgiana. Do you remember what Max
Mueller says, echoed by many another, '_Work is life to me; and when I am
no longer able to work, life will be a heavy burden?_'"

He smiled as he said it, but his daughter read the seldom-expressed
longing in the cheerful voice and laid her cheek for an instant against
his. "He's quite right. And you have your work, Father Davy, and you're
doing it all the time. I think you preach much more effectively now than
you did in the pulpit, even when you don't open your mouth. And when you
do open it angels couldn't compete with you!"

They laughed softly together, though Mr. Warne shook his head. "It's a
curious thing," he mused, "that the weaker the body gets the harder does
the mind have to strive to master it. But, thank God--'_so fight I, not
as one that beateth the air_.'"

"'Not as one that beateth the air,'" murmured the girl. "I should say
not, Father Davy. As one that delivereth hard blows on his own body, his
poor, tired body. Oh, if I had one tenth the self-control----"

At which she ran away, as was quite like her, when emotion suddenly got
the better of her. The darkest cloud on this girl's life was the frail
tenure of her father's existence. The rest could be endured.

The work in the upstairs study went steadily on, in spite of the fact
that James Stuart railed and that Miles Channing came at least once in
seven days, driving the sixty miles in a long, swiftly speeding car
which brought him to the door of the manse before the early May sunset,
and which took him back when the shadows lay black upon the silent road.
Two hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, Georgiana gave to the
rigid performance of the tasks Mr. Jefferson set her, while outside
below the windows at which she worked lay her garden, beloved of her
affection, beseeching her not to neglect it.

It was hard sometimes not to betray how she longed to be outside, as she
wrote on and on, copying the often difficult and uninteresting language
of the more technical part of her employer's construction. And one
afternoon, lifting her eyes to let them dwell on a great budding purple
lilac t