The gate was off the hinges, and Lucy’s muslin was torn upon a nail as she passed through, while the long fringe of her fleecy shawl was caught in the tall tufts of thistle growing by the path. In a muddy pool of water, a few rods from the house, a flock of ducks were swimming, pelted occasionally by the group of dirty, ragged children playing on the grass, and who, at sight of the strangers and the basket Anna carried, sprang up like a flock of pigeons, and came trooping towards her. It was not the sweet, pastoral scene which Lucy had pictured to herself, with Arthur for the background, and her ardor was greatly dampened even before the threshold was crossed, and she stood in the low, close room where the sick woman lay, her eyes unnaturally bright, and turned wistfully upon them as she entered. There were ashes upon the hearth and ashes upon the floor, a hair-brush upon the table and an empty plate upon the chair, with swarms of flies sipping the few drops of molasses and feeding upon the crumbs of bread left there by the elfish-looking child now in the bed beside its mother. There was nothing but poverty,—squalid, disgusting poverty, visible everywhere, and Lucy grew sick and faint at the, to her, unusual sight. “They have not lived here long. We only found them three weeks ago; they will look better by and by,” Anna whispered, feeling that some apology was necessary for the destitution and filth visible everywhere. Daintily removing the plate to the table, and carefully tucking up her skirts, Lucy sat down upon the wooden chair and looked dubiously on while Anna made the sick woman more tidy in appearance, and then fed her from the basket of provisions which Grandma Humphreys had sent. “I never could do that,” Lucy thought, as shoving off the little dirty hand fingering her shoulder-knots she watched Anna washing the poor woman’s face, and bending over her pillow as unhesitatingly as if it had been covered with ruffled linen like those at Prospect Hill, instead of the coarse soiled rag which hardly deserved the name of pillow-case. “No, I never could do that,” and the possible life with Arthur which the maiden had more than once imagined began to look very dreary, when suddenly a shadow darkened the door, and Lucy knew before she turned her head that the rector was standing at her back, and the blood tingled through her veins with a delicious feeling; as, laying both his hands upon her shoulders, and bending over her so that she felt his breath upon her brow, he said: “What, my lady Lucy here? I hardly expected to find two ministering angels, though I was almost sure of one,” and his eye rested on Anna with a wistful look of tenderness, which neither she nor Lucy saw. “Then you knew she was coming,” Lucy said, an uneasy thought flashing across her mind as she remembered the picnic, and the scene she had stumbled upon.