One morning Joan was going through the whole house before the grand final preparations, and for some reason she opened a closet usually little regarded--a closet full of those odds and ends families do not like to destroy. The first thing she lifted was that picture of Denas as "Mademoiselle Denasia in Pinafore." It had been her pride and comfort in sorrowful days now overpast, and she laid it upon the table and stood looking at it. Denas entered the room while this act of tender reminiscence was going on. She did not at first perceive or understand the object of it. But 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.'