pretty well-known in Rio. It seems sometimes in this world as if those unloving natures that shut their hearts against the sunshine around them are suffered to pour out all that they can give where they meet with no return. Perhaps that loving without response is at once their punishment and their blessing. Where all to us looks hard and barren rock, there is at least one little stream of water trickling down into the desert with unselfish bounty. Fabien was the same--except that his faults and his weakness had in those three years become more prominent--but Therese missed the key to her puzzle, herself. It was she who had changed, while all the time she believed it to be Fabien. She had grown up with disadvantages of education like his own, but the nobler nature recognised a higher standard when it was given, and strained towards it. There was the difference. With all her faults and her visions of self-pleasing, she had not the vain satisfied contentment which sees nothing better nor more desirable than itself. She was always, almost unconsciously, wanting something beyond, and that desire is never ungratified. At a time when things seemed saddest, and all about her most mean and petty and discouraging, she was shown a glimpse of the most perfect thing this earth ever has to show--the heart of a good man. There was this in Therese--she recognised at once its goodness and its beauty, it showed her what somehow she had failed to see before. All work is not achieved by the same instruments, though we sometimes speak as if it were. Only it is God's work always. And I think that after Therese knew Max Deshoulieres--knew him as she did in a hundred more ways than there has been space to tell you about here--she unconsciously transferred his qualities to Fabien, his generosity, and patience, and manliness, and truth, and tenderness, so that she used to dream of Fabien with all these making him beautiful. As she rose herself, she could not but also raise that one who held so dear a portion of her heart. Absence softened down the little remembrances which might have interfered with her dreams. And then came the awakening--the awakening, and, alas! the contrast. It is not when we first see what is lovely that. We appreciate it most. It is when we come back to our former ideal. All the glory of mountains, and the vastness of their snow-fields, and the tender radiance of their sunsets, do not fill us with their beauty perfectly until we return and know for the first time how far they excel the things to which our eye had become accustomed--our common hills. It hurts our loyalty sometimes to acknowledge it, but we cannot help it-- nay, we need not try to help it. The best is to be the best always.