"And what do I not owe to my Eunice?" said Fidelia to herself. To Jabez she said--"Yes, I know it made her last days happy to feel that perhaps she had helped you a little. And we must both honour her memory by trying to do in the world what she would have loved to do. I only wish--" Fidelia did not put her wish into words for Jabez's hearing. It was growing dark, and Mrs Stone's white cap at the porch door had been more than once visible as a reminder that the dew was beginning to fall; and they knew it was time to go into the house. But Jabez had one thing more to say, over which he hesitated a moment. "Fidelia, I want to say one thing more, if I may. It was Miss Eunice that made me think more about it, so I hope you won't be vexed. You haven't any brother, and I haven't any sister. Suppose we--adopt one another," said Jabez, with a laugh which had the sound of a sob in it. "Miss Eunice told me more than once, that if ever the time came when I saw you in trouble I must help you, if I had a chance, for her sake." "Oh, my Eunice!" cried Fidelia; and she held out her hand to the lad. And then, to her amazement, he stooped and touched it with his lips before he took it in his own. There were not many words spoken after that. This was their real parting. They met several times before Jabez went away; but it was this half-hour under the apple-trees that Fidelia always remembered, when the thought of Jabez came back to her, with all the other memories of these last days at home. For these were "last days." Fidelia came back again when her year at the seminary was ended. Mrs Stone was still in the old brown house, which in most respects looked just as it had looked when she came home the first time, to find Eunice waiting for her. It was good to see her old friend standing to welcome her at the gate, but her old friend was not Eunice. And, though she wondered that it should be so, and grieved over it, the house in which the greater part of her life had been passed never seemed quite like home again. CHAPTER FIFTEEN. FIDELIA'S PERPLEXITY. This year in the seminary was far more profitable to Fidelia than the former year had been. The work which she had done so faithfully at home told now. She was not pressed or hurried by overwork in preparing for her classes, and had time to take the good of other things besides study.