The successive pastors of the college church came at proper intervals to call. There were no aid societies or "Busy Bees" in the church government, and the young people were not drawn into association by oyster suppers or similar entertainments. Nor was Mrs. Bent drawn into the company of the older women. Mrs. Scott, whose pew was near by, walked with her once or twice a year to the corner and had always some impertinent inquiry to make. Only a week ago she had asked about Eleanor's future. "Nursing, perhaps, Mrs. Bent? Young women are taking up nursing." A person with a sharper tongue than Mrs. Bent's might have asked whether Cora meant to take up nursing. But Mrs. Bent said, with her gentle, frightened air, "Oh, I think not!" "Then, teaching, perhaps?" "She hasn't said anything yet about teaching." "Fit her for something, Mrs. Bent. I suppose she will have to earn her living?" Mrs. Bent smiled and passed on, not seeming to realize that Mrs. Scott's last sentence was a question. Mrs. Scott was still talking. She said, in conclusion, that she had great difficulty in finding maids; that colored girls were almost worse than nobody and that white girls had wrong and proud notions. If she meant to imply that Eleanor had wrong or proud notions, Mrs. Bent did not understand. If she had a "place" in Waltonville society, she knew, alas! where that place was. If Mrs. Scott had suspected the ambitions which filled the mind of pretty Eleanor, she would have run after Mrs. Bent. Eleanor had become inspired with a desire to write, an ambition put into her head by Dr. Green, and zealously cultivated by him, and she had got into shape, without telling any one but her mother, several stories which were not without merit. One she had ventured to send away and to-day the excitement of graduation was dulled by the approach of a more important event. The editor of "Willard's Magazine" to which she had sent "Professor Ellenborough's Last Class" had written to say that a representative of that magazine would call upon her in the course of the week. It was improbable that they would send a messenger from New York to distant and inaccessible Waltonville unless her story was really to be accepted! Yet acceptance was outside the bounds of possibility. "I shouldn't eat or sleep for a week," she declared as the embroidered Commencement dress went over her head and her white shoulders. Mrs. Bent looked up at her with her most frightened expression. Her duckling had proved to be a swan--there was no doubt of that. "Don't set yourself on it," she said, remembering sundry very different disappointments of her own. "Things often don't turn out like we want they should."