You have to keep listening." And the ever returning corrective to such mood came with the evening; for, regularly as she went to bed at night and left it in the morning, she went from the tea-table in the afternoon to her piano, and there, through all the sweet evening movements and atmospheric changes of the brain--for the brain has its morning and evening, its summer and winter as well as the day and the year--would meditate aloud, or brood aloud over the musical meditations of some master in harmony. And oftener than she knew, especially in the twilight, when the days had grown shorter, and his mother feared for him the falling dew, would Mark be somewhere in the dusk listening to her, a lurking cherub, feeding on her music--sometimes ascending on its upward torrent to a solitude where only God could find him. At such time the thought of Vavasor would come, and for a while remain; but it was chiefly as one who would be a welcome helper in her work. When for the time she had had enough of music, softly as she would have covered a child, she would close her piano, then glide like a bat into the night, and wander hither and thither through the gloom without conscious choice. Then most would she think what it would be to have a man for a friend, one who would strengthen her heart and make her bold to do what was needful and right; and if then the thoughts of the maiden would fall to the natural architecture of maidens, and build one or two of the airy castles into which no man has looked or can look, and if through them went flitting the form of Vavasor, who will wonder! It is not the building of castles in the steepest heights of air that is to be blamed, but the building of such as inspector conscience is not invited to enter. To cherish the ideal of a man with whom to walk on her way through the world, is as right for a woman as it was for God to make them male and female; and to the wise virgin it will ever be a solemn thought, lovelily dwelt upon, and never mockingly, when most playfully handled. For there is a play even with most serious things that has in it no offense. Humor has its share even in religion--but oh, how few seem to understand its laws! I confess to a kind of foreboding shudder when even a clergyman begins to jest upon the borders of sacred things. It is not humor that is irreverent, but the mind that gives it the wrong turn. As we may be angry and not sin, so may we jest and not sin. But there is a poor ambition to be married, which is, I fear, the thought most present with too many young women. They feel as if their worth remained unacknowledged, as if there were for them no place they could call their own in society, until they find a man to take them under his wing. She degrades womanhood who thinks thus of herself. It says ill for the relation of father and mother if the young women of a family recoil from the thought of being married, but it says ill for the relation of