From the little gallery that overhung the church, she heard her son's voice in the grey dawn, as he celebrated the earliest Eucharist, and from that hour, perhaps, she did not hear it again till, at eight o'clock in the evening, he came to her room for a half-hour's refreshment after the hard work of his day. The clergy house was on the other side of the church, about half a block away. It was as yet a very miserable affair, only advanced by an application of soap and water from its recent office of mechanics' boarding-house. But St. John seemed to think that half-hour in his mother's peaceful room made up for all. It was very self-indulgent, but he always took a cup of tea from her hands, which she made him out of a little silver tea-pot that she had used since he was a baby a week old. And the cup out of which he drank it, was of Sêvres china, a part of the cadeau brought to the pretty young mother's bedside in that happy week of solicitude. This little service was almost the only souvenir they had brought of the past life now laid away by both of them, but it was very sacred and very sweet, and probably not very sinful. It was a fact, however, that St. John reproached himself sometimes for the eagerness with which he looked forward to this little _soulagement_, during the toils of the day. If he had not felt that it was perhaps as dear and necessary to his mother, I am afraid he would have given it up. Missy saw all this, and much more, of their life, and wondered, as she lay on the lounge that had been brought for her into her mother's room. She saw and wondered, at the interested happy lives of the women in long black dresses, who came and went, in their gliding, silent way, in and out of her mother's room. She could not help seeing, that in the offices, to which the inevitable bell was always calling them, there was no monotony, not so much weariness as in the one-day-in-seven service in a country parish. Their poor, their housekeeping, the interests of their order, seemed to supply all beside that they needed. There was no denying it, their faces were satisfied and happy--except one sister who had dyspepsia, and nobody can look entirely satisfied and happy who has dyspepsia, in the world, or out of it. As to her mother, there was no visible failure in health, but a most visible increase of mental power and energy, and the inexpressible look that comes from doing work your heart is in, from walking in the path for which your feet were formed. Patient doing of duty against the grain may be better than not doing duty at all, but it always writes a weary mark across the face. That mark which her mother's face had borne, ever since Missy could remember it, was gone.