Some good honest blood left in the old veins crept up and tinged the pallid, sunken cheeks. And, suddenly, all my fierceness was gone. I was pleading for the love that had betrayed them at the end of a lifetime. I had his old, old hands in mine that looked so young and strong by contrast, and I was leading him back to their courtship days, to the time when their one little child was born and she almost lost her life. Some of the story I knew from him, and some of it I knew from her. Before I finished the tears were dropping down his cheeks. “The old man has some lonely hours,” he said. Gayly I told him they were over; gayly I pressed my gift into his hand, and I fairly pushed him into her gate. As I hurried on I suddenly realized that the rain was over, that the eastern hills were sparkling under a giant rainbow, and that Ellinor Baxter was rushing toward me with outstretched hands. Ellinor threw as many of her pupils as she could on her assistant, and, with the help of one of the older girls, took my pupils in my absence. “How radiant you look!” I said as I kissed her. “I was afraid you would be all dragged out with the children.” “The children,” she said, vaguely, and then flushing like a rosy girl she plunged into stories of the children’s good behaviour. She turned and walked homeward with me. Was it that fleeting brightness in the sky that made her seem so young and bright and strangely changed? _May 15th._ School closed to-day. Commencement was quite a triumph. Monday morning I went to work in the schoolroom, examinations and commencement exercises on hand. Suddenly the play I had seen with Miss Jackson and thought so bad came into my mind. The more I thought of it the better it seemed. I decided on tableaux, my ideas got from that play. There were just fourteen days in which to work it out, but the children hailed it with joy. It was something new; it was something different. Ellinor’s help was invaluable. Marsville was delighted with it. Ellinor _is_ changed. If there was anybody here to love I’d think she was in love. She was running to angles, and now she’s got some pretty curves, the gray hairs are quite hidden by the new way she is doing her lovely, heavy, red-brown hair, and her soft brown eyes—they are looking out on the spring world with a new, wistful expression in them. She smiles so easily and she hums snatches of tender old songs. _May 22d. Midnight._