The occasion was the weekly assemblage of the Loyal Legion children, who were being educated in the ways of temperance. Miss Tremont opened with the Lord’s Prayer, which she invested with all its meaning; then the children sang from a temperance hymn-book, and the lesson began. Miss Tremont read a series of questions appurtenant to the inevitable results of unholy indulgence, to which Mrs. Blair read the answers, which in turn were repeated by the children. Then they sang “Down with King Alcohol,” a minister came in and made a dramatic address, and the children, some of whom were attentive and some extremely naughty, filed out. “I only come on alternate Fridays,” said Miss Tremont, as they went downstairs; “Sister Beale takes the other. Come and see our reading-room. These are our boarders,” indicating several prim old maids that sat in the front room by the window. In the dining-room a half dozen tramps were imbibing free soup. The reading-room was empty. IV Before a week had passed Patience was so busy that her old life slept as heavily as a bear in winter. She passed her difficult examinations and entered the High School, selecting the three years course, which included French, German, mathematics, the sciences, literature, and rhetoric. The recesses and evenings were spent in study, the afternoons in assisting Miss Tremont; occasionally she snatched an hour to write to her friends in California. Besides the temperance work, she had a class in the church sewing school, kept the books of various societies, and occasionally visited the poor on Hog Heights. The work did not interest her, but she was glad to satisfactorily repay Miss Tremont’s hospitality. But had she wished to protest she would have realised its uselessness: she was carried with the tide. It might be said that Miss Tremont was the tide. Her enthusiasm had no reflex action, and tore through obstacles like a mill-race. When night came she was so weary that more than once Patience offered to put her to bed; but the offer was declined with a curious mixture of religious fervour and hauteur. Miss Tremont had none of the ordinary vanity of woman, but she resented the imputation that she could not work for the Lord as ardently at sixty as she had at forty. When she prayed Patience listened with bated breath. A torrent of eloquence boiled from her lips. All the shortcomings and needs of unregenerate Mariaville, individual and collective, were laid down with a vehement precision which could leave the Lord little doubt of His obligations. The Temperance Cause was rehearsed with a passion which would have thrilled the devil. Sounding through all was a wholly unselfconscious note of command, as when one pleads with the pocket of an intimate friend for some worthy cause.