“Good heavens! And all the time this was what you wanted!” “Yes, this was what I wanted. I didn’t know. But this was it. And think of the luck of getting it!” She looked at him triumphantly. “The amazing wonderful luck! I feel as if I ought to be on my knees, figuratively, all the time, giving thanks.” “Of course,” said Roger North slowly. “That _is_ your mental attitude. No wonder you are so unusual a person. And how about the years that have gone before?” “I sometimes wonder,” she said, thinking, “since I have come here of course, whether every part of our lives isn’t arranged definitely, with a purpose, to prepare us for the next part. It would help a bit through the bad times as well as the good, if one knew it was so, don’t you think?” “I daresay,” Roger North answered vaguely, as was his fashion, Ruth soon discovered, if questioned on such things. “I wish you would tell me something of yourself. What line you came up along would really interest me quite a lot. And it isn’t idle curiosity either.” There was a little silence. “I should like to tell you,” she said at length. But she was conscious at the back of her mind that some one else was interested too, and it was that some one else whom she wanted most of all to tell. CHAPTER II Ruth Seer’s father had been a clergyman of the Church of England, and had spent a short life in doing, in the eyes of his family—a widowed mother and an elderly sister—incredibly foolish things. To begin with he openly professed what were then considered extreme views, and thereby hopelessly alienated the patron of the comfortable living on which his mother’s eye had been fixed when she encouraged his desire to take Holy Orders. “As if lighted candles, and flowers on the altar, and that sort of thing, mattered two brass farthings when £800 a year was at stake,” wailed Mrs. Seer, to a sympathizing friend. Paul Seer then proceeded to fall in love, and with great promptitude married the music mistress at the local High School for Girls. She was adorably pretty, with the temper of an angel, and they succeeded in being what Mrs. Seer described as “wickedly happy” in a state of semi-starvation on his curate’s pay of £120 a year. They had three children with the greatest possible speed. That two died at birth Mrs. Seer looked upon as a direct sign of a Merciful Providence. Poor lady, she had struggled for so many years on a minute income, an income barely sufficient for one which had to provide for three, to say nothing of getting the boy educated by charity, that it was small wonder if a heart and mind, narrow to start with, had become entirely ruled by the consideration of ways and means.