Margaret is expecting Lord William. Can you picture to yourself the aspect of our colony—our numbers, the noise and movement, the joyous voices calling and answering each other, the animation, the eagerness, of this human hive? Our Bretons say they wish we were here always. Edith writes often. Lizzy is somewhat silent; the saintly Isa is too much detached from earth to think of us in any way except in her prayers. My letters to Betsy have produced an unexpected effect, thanks to your prayers; this good and charming friend assures me that going to holy Mass and visiting the poor help her marvellously, and that now the days appear too short. Yesterday we were talking on the terrace—talking about all sorts of things. The word _ideal_ was pronounced. “Who, then, can attain his ideal?” exclaimed M. de Verlhiac. “Life almost always passes away in its pursuit; an intangible phantom, it escapes us precisely at the moment when it seems within our grasp.” “It is, perhaps, because the ideal does not in reality exist on earth,” said Gertrude. “The Christian’s ideal is in heaven!” Whereupon the meditative Anna cried out: “Oh! if only the good God would make haste to put us into his beautiful heaven all together, the _south_ and the _north_! You would not feel cold up there, good friend!” “Then will the angels place us thus by families?” asked Alix timidly. “Hem! hem! the house is large,” said the doctor; “and, for my part, I see no inconvenience that this 'corner of Italy in Brittany’ would suffer by arranging itself commodiously there on high.”