That image of progressive beatitude and expanding youth seized strongly upon my childish imagination.' Mildred's smile was a sufficient answer, and Ethel went on in the same dreamy tone, 'After a time the little dead face became less distinct, and in its place I became conscious of a strange feeling, of a new sort of sister-love. I thought of Ella growing up in heaven, not learning the painful lessons I was so wearily learning here, but schooled by angels in the nobler mysteries of love; and so strong was this belief, that when I was naughty or had given way to temper, I would cry myself to sleep, thinking that Ella would be disappointed in me, and often I did not dare look up at the stars for fear her eyes should be sorrowfully looking down on me. You will think me a fanciful visionary, Miss Lambert, but this childish thought has been my safeguard in many an hour of temptation.' 'I would all our fancies were as pure. You need not fear that I should laugh at you as visionary, my dear Miss Trelawny; after all you may have laid your grasp on a great truth--there can be nothing undeveloped and imperfect in heaven, and infancy is necessarily imperfect.' 'I never sympathised with the crude fancies of the old masters,' returned Miss Trelawny; 'the winged heads of their bodiless cherubs are as unsatisfactory and impalpable as Homer's flitting shades and shivering ghosts; but your last speech has chilled me somehow.' Mildred looked up in surprise; but Ethel's smile reassured her. 'No one but my father ever calls me Ethel--to the world I am Miss Trelawny, even Olive and Chriss are ceremonious, and latterly Mr. Lambert has dropped the old familiar term; somehow it adds to one's feeling of loneliness.' 'Do you mean that you wish me to drop such ceremony?' returned Mildred, laughing a little nervously. 'Ethel! it is a quaint name, hardly musical, and with a suspicion of a lisp, but full of character; it suits you somehow.' 'Then you will use it!' exclaimed Ethel impulsively. 'We are strangers, and yet I have talked to you this afternoon as I have never done to any one before.' 'There you pay me a compliment.' 'You have such a motherly way with you, Mildred--Miss Lambert, I mean.' Mildred blushed, 'Please do not correct yourself.' 'What! I may call you Mildred? how nice that will be; I shall feel as though you are some wise elder sister, you have got such tender old-fashioned ways, and yet they suit you somehow. I like you better, I think, because there seems nothing young about you.'