A curiously sweet expression crossed Mr. Logan's face as he walked by Queenie's side down the path bordered by plane trees that led from the station to the Deerhound. "Miss her! how can we help missing her?" cried the girl, appealing to him with sorrowful eyes, as though to claim his sympathy. "Langley will be dreadfully lonely without her, and as for Emmie and me! why she was the only friend that we had at Granite Lodge, the dearest, and the kindest, and the bravest." But here Queenie's eulogy ended in a little sob. "Young things love to try their strength," replied Mr. Logan, softly. "We would fain clip their wings, but they would be sure to grow again. When I think of Miss Catherine," he went on, his eyes darkening strangely, "going out so bravely to her work in the heart of the great city without a tear on her bright face, however much her heart may be aching at leaving us all behind, I cannot help thinking of the white dove flying all those days over those wastes of water, with the olive branch in its mouth, and what Noah must have felt when he pulled it into the ark. It did not come to him even of its own accord, the wild weary thing, but he must needs put out his hand and draw it into its refuge." Queenie looked up at him somewhat startled, but he did not seem to notice her surprise; his eyes had a far-off, abstracted look in them, and during the remainder of the walk he preserved an almost unbroken silence. Cathy wrote long cheery letters, full of amusing descriptions. She liked her work on the whole, she told them, and was not daunted by the difficulties that beset the path of beginners. "It was all in the day's work," as she wrote; "and what was the good of possessing a fount of endurance fit for a Spartan woman if there was nothing to bear. In fact, I am determined to serve my noviciate properly, and to make the best of things. I am no more inclined to see bugbears now than I was to discern Emmie's favorite ghost in the old garret at Granite Lodge; so make your mind easy, my precious old Queen, and do not indulge in any more troublesome fancies on my account." Queenie did not show these letters to any one but Emmie; but the two gloated over them in private, and tried to imagine Cathy in her black stuff dress and little white cap, moving among the dim wards with her light springy step hushed so as not to disturb the sleepers, "looking not a bit like our Cathy, but like any other ordinary person," as Emmie observed with a sigh. But if Queenie missed her friend now, the time was to come when she would yearn for her out of the fulness of an over-charged and wounded heart; when her first thought would be, "If only Cathy were here." Things were not quite satisfactory between herself and Garth Clayton. The young man had grown strangely shy in his ways with her, and held himself almost entirely aloof from the cottage. The fact was, Garth was in a predicament.