“It is horrible, papa!” cried Lucy, almost with tears. Then, though she was not an imaginative girl, there suddenly came across her mind the story which she had been telling to little Jock. She had denied stoutly that it was an allegory, as Jock’s more experienced imagination had at once feared; but there was something in the course of this conversation which chimed in with it, which brought it to her mind. Just so had the giant in that story sought his strongest and greatest. The end of the tale which she had not told to Jock was very incomprehensible to Lucy herself. She had not understood it when it was “read out loud,” but it did not trouble her mind much. She thought it would do for a story to tell Jock, that was all. Now she thought of it again as she sat over the almonds and raisins opposite to her father and listened to him, and shrunk from the map of life which he opened out before her. His revelations went up to just about the same point as the story she had told to Jock. And after that came the incomprehensible part, how to discern the best, how to get to the acquaintance of the mysterious conqueror of all. Jock had said that was the difficult bit. In the story it was all a confusion to Lucy, and she could not understand it at all. While she was thinking thus her father was talking on, but she had lost a good deal of what he was saying when she suddenly came to herself again, and began to hear him as if his voice came out of a mist. “And when that has happened once or twice,” old Trevor was saying, “you get sharp, oh, you get sharp! you are up to their devices--you can not be taken in any more.” “You speak as if everybody tried to take you in, papa.” “Very near everybody,” said old Trevor, grinning, with a chuckle; “not all, I don’t say all--but very near: and the hard thing is to find out the ones that don’t want to take you in. That is a thing which you have to learn by experience, Lucy. First you trust everybody--then you trust nobody; but after awhile the sight comes back to your eyes, and you know who to trust. That is about the best lesson you can have in this world. I was over fifty before I met with your mother; that is to say, I had known her when we were younger, but I had not given any attention to her, not having learned then to discriminate. We saw a deal of each other for two years before we married; so you see I was a long time before I got hold of my best, and yet I did get it at the end.” Lucy was disturbed out of her usual composure by all this alarming and discouraging talk, and she was slightly irritated, she could scarcely have told why, by all she had heard about her mother. She could not avoid a little retaliation. “But afterward,” she said, “after--when poor mamma died--was that the best too?”