If she thought he had not much mind to improve she did not say so, and in her best gingham gown and white apron, she took the only chair left except the one near Craig, reserved for Helen. That young lady had been having a rather unenviable time with Browning. It was now more than three weeks since that first day at the Prospect House when Alice had gone out to find the library, if there was one. She had found it without difficulty and inquired for Browning’s Poems. “Which volume?” the librarian said. Alice didn’t know, and confessed her ignorance. “What particular poem do you wish to read?” was the next question. “Sordello,” Alice replied, and the librarian brightened at once. “Oh, yes; Vol. I. We have that, and it is nearly always in, so few care for it; they find it tough reading, they say. You like it, I suppose?” and the librarian looked over his spectacles at Alice, who said, “I don’t know; I never read it.” “Wouldn’t try, then; hard work and little pay,” and the old man shook his head; then added, as he handed the book to her, “if you must read it, better take the encyclopedia, which will help you amazingly. Here ’tis.” Alice took the book and turning the leaves found the story which she knew would be a help and which she might herself like to read. “Thank you,” she said. “I will take both; they don’t look as if they were often used.” “Very seldom. Not on an average once a year. There’s a chap at the hotel been in twice and looked at the encyclopedia. He’s pretty well up in Browning, I guess. You are from the hotel, too, aren’t you?” Alice bowed in the affirmative and left the library. For some days the books reposed quietly on Helen’s dressing table. So many things came up to occupy Craig’s mind that it took but little tact to put the club out of it for a while. The moment, however, that Helen saw signs of its revival she attacked Sordello in earnest, taking the poem first and reading five or six pages very carefully, over and over again, first to herself and then to Alice, who consented to listen unwillingly, for she knew that Jeff was waiting to take her to the hornet’s nest and the turtles, and twice his shrill whistle came in at the window telling her he was ready. For a time she sat very quiet, for Helen was a fine reader, but when she reached the “Progress of a Poet’s Soul,” and asked what some of the passages meant, Alice sprang up exclaiming, “I don’t know any more than the dead, and I doubt if anybody does. I’ve promised Jeff to go with him to the woods and pond to see a turtle bed and hornet’s nest. Good bye, and good luck to you.” She was gone and Helen was alone with Sordello. “No more soul than to prefer mud turtles and hornets to Browning. I supposed she had a higher grade of mind,” Helen said, with a sigh of self-satisfaction, as she thought of her cousin tramping through the fields to the woods in company with Jeff, while she, with her higher grade of mind, was wrestling with Browning.