"It is not easy," he returned, quietly; "but I do not know that we ought to give up trying, for all that." And then his manner changed, and he put his arm round her in his old fashion. "Recollect, I want you very much, Grace: your coming will make me far happier. Mattie only touches the outside of things; I want some one near me who can go deeper than that,--who will help me with real work, and put up with my bad humors; for I am a man who is very liable to discouragement." And when he had said this, he bade her good-bye. It was a comfort to Archie to find himself hard at work again. These few days of idleness had been irksome to him. Now he could throw himself without stint or limit into his pastoral labors, walking miles of country road until he was weary, and planning new outlets for the feverish activity that seemed to stimulate him to fresh efforts. People began to talk of the young vicar. His sermons were changed somehow. There was more in them,--"less of the husk, and more of the kernel," as Miss Middleton once remarked rather pithily. They were wonderfully brief discourses; but, whereas they had once been elegant and somewhat scholarly productions, they were now earnest and even pungent. If the sentences were less carefully compiled, more rough-hewn, and deficient in polish, there was matter in them that roused people and made them think. "I never could remember Mr. Drummond's sermons before," Dulce once observed, "but now I can recollect whole sentences quite nicely." Phillis, to whom she spoke, assented by a nod. If she had chosen, she could have admitted the fact that she could remember not sentences, but the entire sermon itself. In secret she marvelled also at the change. "He is more earnest," she would say to herself. "He preaches now, not from the outside, but from the inside of things,--from his own experience, not from other people's. That makes the difference." And to Nan, who was her other conscience, she said one day, when they were discussing this subject,-- "I have been thinking a great deal about sermons lately. I wish I could publish the result of my cogitation. I feel inclined to write a pamphlet and entitle it 'Hints to the Clergy.' I think it would take vastly." It was Sunday afternoon, and they were sitting together on their favorite boulder. Phillis had christened it her "thinking-stone." "I never think to more purpose than when I am sitting here," she would say. Nan, who was looking out to sea rather dreamily, intent on her usual vision, Dick, roused herself at this, and began to smile in a lofty way. "You think yourself very clever, Phillis, and so do I; but sermons are hardly in your province, my dear." Phillis shook her head gravely. She dissented from this view of the case.