right."

"Yes," said Howard, "I feel that I have been very foolish--but it has
been going on all the time, like the music and the light. It hasn't
been wasted. I have had a wonderful talk with her to-day--the most
wonderful talk, I think, I have ever had. I can't understand it all
yet--but she has given me the sense of some fine purpose--as if I had
been kept away for a purpose, because I was not ready; and as if I had
come here for a purpose now."

The girl sate looking at him with open eyes, and with some strange
sense of surprise. "Yes," she said, "it is just like that; but that you
could have seen it so soon amazes me. I have known her all my life, and
could never have put that into words. Do you know how things seem to
come and go and shift about without any meaning? It is never so with
her; she sees what it all means. I cannot explain it."

They sate in silence for a moment, and then Howard said: "It is very
curious to be here; you know, or probably you don't know, how much
interested I am in Jack; and somehow in talking to him I felt that
there was something behind--something more to know. All this"--he waved
his hand at the room--"my aunt, your father, yourself--it does not seem
to me new and unfamiliar, but something which I have always known. I
can't tell you in what a dream I have seemed to be moving ever since I
came here. I have been here for twenty-four hours, and yet it seems all
old and dear to me."

"I know that feeling," said the girl, "one dips into something that has
been going on for ever and ever--I feel like that to-night. It seems
odd to talk like this, but you must remember that Jack tells me most
things, and I seem to know you quite well. I knew it would be all easy
somehow."

"Well, we are a sort of cousins," said Howard lightly. "That's such a
comfort; it needn't entail anything, but it can save one all sorts of
fencing and ceremony. I want to talk to you about Jack. He is a little
mysterious to me still."

"Yes," she said, "he is mysterious, but he really is a dear: he was the
most aggravating boy that ever lived, and I sometimes used really to
hate him. I am afraid we used to fight a great deal; at least I did,
but I suppose he was only pretending, for he never hurt me, and I know
I used to hurt him--but then he deserved it!"

"What a picture!" said Howard, smiling; "no wonder that boys go to
their private schools expecting to have to fight for their lives. I
never had a sister; an