In her dark blue cloth dress, and with her yellow head and rose-tinted cheeks, she did not look as grown-up as she felt; she had taken life, not only with both hands, but with heart, brain, and spirit, and with all her might. There was nothing in her that she had not put into her life; her simple, Bensalem life. “Aunt Affy,” she said, as Aunt Affy’s step paused on the threshold between kitchen and sitting-room, “Come and rest awhile in this fire-light. This fire on the hearth to-night reminds me of the glow of the grate in Summer Avenue when I used to tell pictures to mother.” Aunt Affy pulled down the shades; Judith drew Aunt Affy’s chair to the home-made rug—Aunt Rody’s rug,—to the hearth, and then sat down on the hassock at her feet, and looked into the fire, not the curly-headed girl in Summer Avenue, but the girl grown up. “Aunt Affy, tell _me_ a picture,” she coaxed. “What about?” “About myself. I’m afraid I am too full of myself. I cannot understand something. I can tell you about it, for it is past, and I can look at it as something in the past. You know those years I was at the parsonage, at my boarding-school, I was crammed full with one hope.” Judith was looking at the fire; the eyes looking down at her were solicitous, tender. She had been afraid Judith “cared too much” for the young minister; but it must be over now, or she could not tell her about it so frankly. “I dreamed it, I studied it, I wrote it, I prayed about it, I _breathed_ it.” “Oh,” said Aunt Affy, with a quick, heavy sigh. “Don’t pity me. It was good for me, blessed for me, or it could not have happened, you know. I thought there was some great work for me to do—” “Oh,” said Aunt Affy, with a quick, relieved cry.