"Yes; her name was Alice; she is still my little girl," returned the poor mother, speaking with her pure maternal faith, and unconsciously verifying the eternity of love; "the treasure once given never really lost, only lent to safe keeping." "Of course she is your little girl," was Emmie's answer. "You mean to see her again some day, only she is not keeping house with you now; perhaps she would have got tired. God would know all about that; He does not like children to be tired; He was very nearly taking me away for the same reason, only I got rested somehow." "Captain, do you hear that?" "Aye, poor bairn; too big a mind for so small a body." "Am I like her?" persisted Emmie curiously, looking up into the plain face, now softened into motherly comeliness, the beautifier, love, smoothing out irregularities and roughnesses even on Mrs. Fawcett's unloving visage. Queenie heard afterwards that she had never been handsome even in her youth, but that she had been loved, as some plain women are by men, with a constancy and devotion which many a spoiled beauty fails to win. "He must have seen the real goodness shining behind her plainness," Cathy said afterwards, when Queenie and she talked the matter over. "Are you like her, darling?" answered Mrs. Fawcett, mournfully. "You have her large blue eyes; but, until she fell ill, she had rosy cheeks and long dark curls. She was the very image of her father, the dear angel." "My hair has been cut off," returned Emmie, pointing to the soft little rings just peeping under her cap; "it means to curl too some day. I have always longed for curls; so the angels always have them in pictures." "Come with me, my little maid, and look at my roses," interrupted the Captain, reading his wife's troubled countenance aright. The tears streamed over the thin face as Emmie trotted happily away with him. "That is just the way they walked hand in hand every morning to look at the roses," sobbed the poor mother. "'Father's roses' were the last words Alice ever said; 'I should like one of father's roses'; and when he went out to pick her one she put her head down on my shoulder and then she was gone." Queenie's long eye-lashes glittered with sympathizing tears. She could enter into all; she had so nearly lost Emmie. She thought of the father going down to his garden to pick red and white roses for the little dead hand that could not open to receive them. "My beloved is gone down into his garden to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies": those beautiful words of the Canticles came into her mind. What if in Paradise, while parents wept below for them that are not, the children they had lost went in bright bands after One who died for them, "when He went down into His garden to gather lilies!"