“I will write it down,” promised Judith, who loved to write things down, “and date it February fifteenth. Told in the Firelight. I know what it means better than I can say it. I often know what things mean, but I cannot say it.” “Any more pictures?” suggested her mother, in a voice as bright as Judith’s own. “An old face with pink cheeks and a long gray curl behind each ear, the softest step and the kindest voice—but I always forget and put sounds in my pictures. Those sounds are always in my picture of Aunt Affy.” “You have not made a picture of Aunt Rody.” “I don’t like to tell a picture of Aunt Rody. She is so old, so old—and she isn’t happy—and I don’t believe she’s good. If it were not for Aunt Rody I should think all old people were good; that all you had to do to be good was to grow up and grow old.” “She is not happy. Once, years and years ago, so long ago that almost everybody has forgotten, she had a bitter disappointment.” “What was it about, mother?” asked the girl, who always wove a love-story into the stories she planned as she stepped about the kitchen, or darned and mended the household wear. “She was ready to be married—she learned that the man she loved—and Aunt Rody _could_ love in those days—was a very, very bad man; he deceived her; it did not break her heart, or soften it; it made it hard. Unless we forgive, our hearts grow hard; she could not forgive; she has said that she does not know how to forgive. Only in forgiving do our hearts grow like God’s heart. He is always forgiving.” “I forgave somebody once,” remembered Judith; “mother,” with a start, “I do not always forgive Aunt Rody when she is ugly to me; if I do not will I have a hard heart?” “Yes. That spot toward Aunt Rody will grow harder and harder. You cannot love God with the part of your heart that does not forgive.” “Oh, deary _me_,” groaned Judith, springing up. “Will you like milk-toast to-night? And prunes? Don says I know how to cook prunes.” “Perhaps he will come to supper.” “Then he must have a chop. Mother, I like to keep house. It’s easy. It’s easier than forgiving,” she said, with her merry little laugh, and a deep-down heartache. II. SQUARE ROOT AND OTHER THINGS. “Let never day or night unhallowed pass; But still remember what the Lord hath done.” —Shakespeare. “Judith, would you like to go up to Lottie’s room for an hour?” Judith’s mother was still sitting before the grate with her feet lifted to the fender; the tall figure of Donald Mackenzie stood behind the wheel chair, bending, with his folded arms upon the back of the chair. “Yes, mother,” replied the voice from the kitchen, a busy, pre-occupied voice. Don had wiped the dishes for her, brought up coal, taken down ashes, and declared that his three chops were the finest he had ever eaten. “Lottie and her books just went up,” said Judith standing in the door-way, and untying her kitchen apron. “Don, will you call me when you go?”