They both understood that beauty and grandeur were not far-off, hardly attained ideals, and that the great pleasures were set in the world rather as incentives and rewards, than highly seasoned daily food which must inevitably produce satiety. Some time, when they had earned this glorious vacation, they would take it hungering with the healthy appetite of a well-trained soul. At present the duty was to deny one's self firmly and contentedly, to round off the sharp corners, to shape the daily living to high, pure purposes; so that the greater excellences of Art should not despise the minor forms, the steps whereby true perfection was attained, the tangled threads that often required more real genius to comprehend than the one great moment of inspiration. They came home again fresh and bright, with the peculiar fragrance of a new life about them, just as you shall smell spring in the woods on some mild, sunny February day. Fred fluctuated between office and city, quite a prophet of household art, welcomed warmly back to the old circles which had so quietly dropped him for a while. Is there not a great deal of this unconscious proving of the fine metal of souls in the world? We cry out as we are thrust aside, or given some hard task to do; we wonder people do not hold out kindly hands, smile with sympathetic eyes; and yet their very help might weaken us. When we have beaten our way across with the roar of the distant waves still in our ears, the shadows of the black, fierce, jagged cliff hardly faded, the taste of the brackish spray still lingering on our lips, an exultant thrill speeds through every nerve as we clasp a hand that has had to buffet through the same fateful current. Early in April Miss Barry had another seizure, a fatal stroke this time. For a few days she lay in sweet content; and then dropped peacefully out of existence. It seems always a mystery, why such earnest, useful souls, doing that highest of all work,--a pure, unselfish charity,--should be taken away, and the slothful, dependent, ease-loving, selfish ones left. The Darcys felt that Mrs. Lawrence could have been spared much more easily, and served a higher economy in point of usefulness. But God, who sees every end from the beginning, and is all-wise, judges differently. Miss Barry had done her work, no light life-task either. Only God knew what it had been, days of toil and nights of watching and prayer, such pain as only a strong soul could have kept to itself, and smiled over. Yet she had her exceeding sweet reward in this world,--years of peace and comfort, the child-love she had missed in one way, supplied in another, the hope of her days crowned more wisely by the waiting.