Missy was crying now, in earnest, as they walked up the path, and Mr. Andrews looked dreadfully distressed. "O no," she said, through her tears, "it's a comfort to find anybody that doesn't know. Everybody here knows so horridly well! I never talk to anybody. I haven't said a word about it to anyone for months and months. It's a comfort to talk to you about it--if I ever can--only I've got crying and I can't stop." She sat down on the steps of the summer parlor, where it was sheltered and where the afternoon sun was still shining. Mr. Andrews sat down silently beside her, and after a few more struggles with her tears she took her hands away from her face and began to tell him the story of the past year. Her eyes were a trifle red, and her skin mottled with her strong emotion; but I don't think Mr. Andrews minded. "Mamma has gone away from me," she said, "to be with St. John and help him in his work. She has founded a sort of religious house, of which she isn't to be all the head, or anything like that, I believe; but a Sisterhood are there, of which she is an associate, and she sees St. John every day, and the room in which she lives opens into the church that St. John gave the money to buy--and they do a great and beautiful work among poor people and they are very happy. "It didn't kill mamma as I thought it would, she is better than she was at home. Everybody here blames her, and that is why I can't talk to any of them. But you mustn't blame her. Hard as it has been to me, I begin to see it was not wrong for her to do it. If I had been good I should have done it too; but I wasn't, and I had to suffer for it. O, if I could only be like her and like St. John! I don't see how I came to be so different. At first I hated St. John, and I blamed her, but now I know in my heart they are all right, and I am all wrong. I can't understand it or explain it. I only know the truth--that people that can do what they've done are--are God's own. If I lived a hundred years, I couldn't be like them, nor be satisfied with what satisfies them. I couldn't ever be anything but very poor and very common-place, but oh, I mean to be better than I used to be--a year ago. O, I can't bear to think of it. But there is no use in talking of what's past. It was right that I should have to go through what I've gone through, but oh, it was very hard. And I have been so ill, and everything is so changed in my life. You can't think how like a dream it all seems to me, when I look back. This place has been let all summer to strangers, and your place too, and we are living in the old Roncevalle house, Aunt Harriet and I. And somehow or another I have got further and further off from all our friends here. I know they blame mamma and they pity me, and I don't like either one or the other thing, and I haven't any friend or any one to talk to, and it has been loneliness such as you can't understand. But I had got used to things in a certain sort as they are, and I had been