It was a season of keen delight. Rose had thought she knew what it was to revel in intellectual pleasure, but it was something new to meet one so superior to herself, yet so loving; always ready to listen to her ideas, to help her unfold them, and yet so calm and tranquil. Miss Lawton was an invalid, and, after that first Sunday, Rose never saw her at church again. Once, when Rose stopped on her way thither to leave her some flowers, Miss Lawton said that she was going to sit in the sunshine; would not Rose stay with her? And when Rose demurred, Miss Lawton said gently, “Shall we not please God as well in the beauty of his sunshine as in that bare and cheerless house where you know you do not like to go?” This was the beginning of Rose’s first knowledge of Ellen Lawton’s so-called religious life; they sat and talked all that morning about it. With a sweet smile upon her calm face, the invalid said quietly that she believed there might be a God; she was not sure, of course; but if there was one, he was kind and good, and loved to see her happy. She made life as bright and beautiful as she possibly could always; it was given her to enjoy. Books and music and art and flowers were parts of her religion; beyond this world she did not look; what came after death she knew not and cared not; if there was a God, he was good and would be good to her; if there was not, the thought of annihilation did not distress her. Rose watched her closely after this; she never heard an impatient word or saw a hasty movement; the life was an exposition of what a great many people would call “the beautiful,” and Rose found in it more and more satisfaction for her extreme intellectual cravings. One morning a servant ran in with blanched face to tell her that Miss Lawton was dead. Rose had known that heart-disease was the fatal malady which was surely sapping at her friend’s life, yet this blow fell upon her with an awful suddenness. She went to the house, where they left her to do as she would, for she was the nearest friend Miss Lawton had there; she went up to the silent room, and shut herself in alone with the silent dead. Ellen Lawton lay as they had found her; she must have risen in the morning and dressed with her usual dainty care; then, perhaps feeling some acute pang of the pain to which she was subject, she had sunk upon the couch by the window. Her face was, as in life, calm and noble; about her lay her books that she had loved, her rare pictures looked down upon her, her flowers scented the room; outside the sun shone brightly on the grand hills she had been used to watch, finding in them food for heart and soul both, she said. None of these moved her now at all.