er taught to regard it."

"Yet none keep Lent more strictly than Conall Ragnor."

"A wife does not always adopt her husband's ideas. I had a father,
Adam, uncles and cousins and friends. None of them kept Lent. Dost
thou expect me to be wiser than all my kindred?"

"I do."

"Let us cease this talk. It will come to nothing."

"Then good-bye."

"Be not hard on Sunna. One side only, has been heard."

"As kindly as may be, I will do right."

Then Adam went away, but he left Rahal very unhappy. She had disobeyed
her husband's advice and she could not help asking herself if she
would have been as easily persuaded to tell a similar story about her
own child. "Thora is a school girl yet," she thought, "but she is just
entering the zone of temptation."

In the midst of this reflection Thora came into the room. Her mother
looked into her lovely face with a swift pang of fear. It was radiant
with a joy not of this world. A light from an interior source
illumined it; a light that wreathed with smiles the pure, childlike
lips. "Oh, if she could always remain so young, and so innocent! Oh,
if she never had to learn the sorrowful lessons that love always
teaches!"

Thus Rahal thought and wished. She forgot, as she did so, that women
come into this world to learn the very lessons love teaches, and that
unless these lessons are learned, the soul can make no progress, but
must remain undeveloped and uninstructed, even until the very end of
this session of its existence.

CHAPTER III

ARIES THE RAM

O Christ whose Cross began to bloom
With peaceful lilies long ago;
Each year above Thy empty tomb
More thick the Easter garlands grow.
O'er all the wounds of this sad strife
Bright wreathes the new immortal life.

Thus came the word: Proclaim the year of the Lord!
And so he sang in peace;
Under the yoke he sang, in the shadow of the sword,
Sang of glory and release.
The heart may sigh with pain for the people pressed and slain,
The soul may faint and fall:
The flesh may melt and die--but the Voice saith, Cry!
And the Voice is more than all.--CARL SPENCER.

It was Saturday morning and the next day was Easter Sunday. The little
town of Kirkwall was in a state of happy, busy excitement, for though
the particular house cleaning of the great occasion was finished,
every housewife was full laden with the heavy responsibility of
feeding the guests sure to arrive for the Easter servi