Clara said we were like children running through a meadow, trampling the daisies and clovers under our feet, and with breathless impatience hurrying on through the long day to the fall of night, and when the sunset of our earthly life came on, pausing then at the corner of the meadow, we gathered the few tired blossoms at our feet and passed out into the unknown. "Oh, my Emily!" she said, "if our steps could be even and slow we should pick our comfort-daisies and our love-clovers on either side, while our feet still kept the one small path of our greatest duty; and this to me is the straight and narrow path spoken of." Her types of thought were so purely beautiful, and yet she drew them from the plainest facts. She was growing nearer heaven daily, or perhaps we were seeing her soul more clearly through the days. I thought and comforted myself that we should not lose her. Louis and I talked sometimes of the coming time when we should receive the sacred seal of marriage, and when the year for which he asked had expired and the fall term opened in the seminary, he said: "Little mother tells me she cannot let me go back, she is too tired to live without me. I knew it before she told me; her strength is very little without mine, and," he added, "even if we do all we can, that little mother must leave us before many years. You know, Emily, how I have wanted all my life to be an artist. Perhaps I shall, sometime, but now before me I can see a need that will bring me into different work, and it may be also (his eyes were far away) I can, after all, do better service by painting living faces." "What do you mean, Louis? "I mean, Emily, that when the tired hearts we find, feel comfort creeping over them, the work shines through the eyes and glows within the smiles that beam upon us. Did we not paint a pleasant picture at the wedding, and are not these works of art appreciated through endless time? Will they not repay us with something better than the gold which we may lose, the earthly things that perish? And again, I have seriously thought that it is not right for me to take the work that others who need might have. Side by side with our great love must walk these truths. I cannot see yet how our future plans are to be arranged, or where our home will be. What does your good heart say, Emily?" "Oh! I cannot tell you, Louis. I sometimes imagine a little cosy home like Hal's, and then it dissolves beyond my reach and I say 'Time will tell it all.' Your mother taught me that one of the greatest lessons in life is to learn to wait, and move with the tide if we can instead of against it. These hills are very dear to me." "May they never be less!" said Louis, gathering me to himself; while I reverently thought, "How glorious a manhood is his! how great the love he gives me!"