than in this little room, on which I see you so often cast round your eyes curiously, perhaps pitifully, my lady." "It is not at all a fit place for _you_," said Clementina with a touch of indignation. "Softly, my lady, lest, without knowing it, your love should make you sin. Who set thee, I pray, for a guardian angel over my welfare? I could scarce have a lovelier, true; but where is thy brevet? No, my lady: it is a greater than thou that sets me the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps He may give me a palace one day. If I might choose, it would be things that belong to a cottage--the whiteness and the greenness and the sweet odors of cleanliness. But the Father has decreed for His children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. Who can imagine how in this respect things looked to our Lord when He came and found so little faith on the earth? But perhaps, my lady, you would not pity my present condition so much if you had seen the cottage in which I was born, and where my father and mother loved each other, and died happier than on their wedding-day. There I was happy too until their loving ambition decreed that I should be a scholar and a clergyman. Not before then did I ever know anything worthy the name of trouble. A little cold and a little hunger at times, and not a little restlessness always, was all. But then--ah, then my troubles began. Yet God, who bringeth light out of darkness, hath brought good even out of my weakness and presumption and half-unconscious falsehood. When do you go?" "To-morrow morning, as I purpose." "Then God be with thee! He _is_ with thee, only my prayer is that thou mayst know it. He is with me, and I know it. He does not find this chamber too mean or dingy or unclean to let me know Him near me in it." "Tell me one thing before I go," said Clementina: "are we not commanded to bear each other's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ? I read it to-day." "Then why ask me?" "For another question: does not that involve the command to those who have burdens that they should allow others to bear them?" "Surely, my lady. But _I_ have no burden to let you bear." "Why should I have everything and you nothing? Answer me that." "My lady, I have millions more than you, for I have been gathering the crumbs under my Master's table for thirty years." "You are a king," answered Clementina. "But a king needs a handmaiden somewhere in his house: that let _me_ be in yours. No, I will be proud, and assert my rights: I am your daughter. If I am not, why am I here? Do you not remember telling me that the adoption of God meant a closer relation than any other fatherhood, even His own first fatherhood, could signify? You cannot cast me off if you would. Why should you be poor when I am rich? You _are_ poor: you cannot deny it," she concluded with a serious playfulness.