with motherly touches until she was safe in bed, knew more about the future than Lucy could dream, seeing in it the light of her own past. She went to the Dean with a petition.

"Lucy Pease is a heroine!" she began.

"Indeed! Well, that may be, but she has the soul of a mouse, my dear!"

"If you had that thought, why did you encourage her to try this uphill task?"

"Because I am soft-hearted. When I set the difficulties before her, she was resolute; when I said I thought there was no room for even one more self-supporting student this year, her eyes filled with tears and she looked as though she would die on the spot. She told me she had walked a good deal of the way from Iowa to Wisconsin. She didn't mind it in pleasant weather!"

"I knew her years ago. I was the minister's sister in the place where she lived. Lucy Pease is the most unselfish woman in the world, and she loves books as a miser loves gold. She's never had a chance. I want her to have one now, but she'll not succeed in waiting on the table. Let her try cooking."

"It's harder; and what can she do?"

"She can make bread that won't be sour or soggy. Let her try her hand there."

It was so arranged. The girls saw little of the shy student, whose loaves and biscuits were like puffs of snow, and who was seldom seen outside of her classes. She roomed alone, and joined in none of the games and festivities. It was wonderful how well she did her work, tossing it off as if it were play, and expanding with the joy of it. The class grew proud of her. She was its ornament, and did "stunts" that nobody else attempted. But she kept aloof from society, stole in and out of the chapel like a shadow, and made bread day by day, the like of which Elmore Hall had never tasted.

Lucy's people had come from Mississippi, and as her father belonged to the contingent who never got on, they had known a good many changes. Her childhood in Wisconsin had been brightened by the visits of Southern cousins, beautiful, graceful girls and gallant, high-bred men, who satisfied the poetry of her nature, and gave her noble ideals, which the shy, reserved child, kept to herself. Only her mother read her aright, and only she understood Lucy's hunger and thirst for an education. She told her, with almost her last breath, "Daughter, be firm. Carry out your plans." After the family went to Iowa, and the mother died, the Southern cousins ceased to come, though Cousin Luther always wrote periodically to the little girl to whom he later left a legacy. In the Iowa home poverty had been the rule and ease the exception, so Lucy had learned every sort of household work, and of society she had known little, the minister's wife and sister being the only ones who sought her out and tried to help her in her daily tasks. It made Elmore Hall home for her at once when she found Miss Kezia there.

Lucy Pease could not afford to go home for holidays. When the spring vacation came, and most of the students hurried away to their homes, she, with a few others, remained. The great building with its many rooms at this time had its annual cleaning. Lucy went to the matron. "Couldn't I help clean house, Mrs. Somers?"

The matron looked at her. The small, erect figure was slight but strong, with muscles like whipcord.

"There is scrubbing to do, Miss Pease, and there's cleaning paint, and washing windows, and I need another woman very much. The pay is a dollar a day. But the women I've engaged are colored. You might not wish to work with them."

Lucy smiled. "I won't mind them, if they don't mind me, Mrs. Somers." And she earned her dollar a day. There was good stuff in Lucy Pease. She felt that a gen

tlewoman cannot demean herself by honest work. The colored women treated her as if she were a princess gone astray, and they were aghast at her undertaking to scrub and scour, but did their own work better for seeing how well she did hers. As for the few girls who were staying over the holiday, they vied with each other in paying Lucy little attentions. One of them said, "She'll be somebody yet, and we'll be telling people we were in college with her when she washed windows and took Latin prizes in the same year."

Yet, but for an accident they never would have known the real Lucy at Elmore. The midsummer term was nearly over, and the whole college in the throes of the annual final exams, when Elsie Raimond was taken down with scarlet fever, and had to be quarantined. It was a peculiarly malignant variety of the disease. Her parents

had gone abroad, and there was not a trained nurse in Winsted.

The doctor was about to telegraph to Cincinnati for one, when a quiet little figure in a print gown and white apron stood at his elbow.

"Let me nurse her, doctor, please let me. I know as much about nursing as any hospital nurse you can get. I'm here, and I'm not afraid of the fever. I pulled six brothers and sisters through it one year."

"I ought to tell you, if you are connected with the college," said the physician, looking keenly into the alert, eager face, and at once giving this woman his confidence, "that this will be a long illness, and likely a slow convalescence. If you are a student, you may miss a good deal of time, maybe you'll miss a year."

"Never mind that, doctor. I waited a good while before I came, and I'm not afraid of a tough job. Let me nurse Elsie. I want to, because she is so pretty."

She won her point. In the fierce battle that followed, she watched, and struggled, and fought as only the born

nurse can.

She put aside her ambition, her books, her hope to graduate, and took care of Elsie Raimond, and Elsie Raimond recovered, thanks to the Lord and Lucy Pease.

"You called that girl a heroine," said the Dean to Miss Kezia, "and I doubted you. Now I call her a saint."

The years drifted by as years do. When the day came on which Elsie Raimond and Lucy Pease were graduated, Lucy gave the valedictory. No one of the whole class had so many bouquets. No one so much applause. The quiet little woman was the most popular member of the class.

"I'm coming back," she said happily, to the Dean, “after my vacation is over, to see if you haven't some steady work for me, if it is only bread-making. I would like to spend the rest of my life here, and I will if I can."

Even as she spoke, a letter was placed in her hand. It was from home. "Come back, Lucy," wrote her father, "come as quick as ever you can. Your ma has had a stroke. We want you."

So she went back and carried sunshine to the invalid and the worried father. But later on, when God made the way plain, Lucy did return to the college she loved, and married a gray-haired professor, and became the guardian genius of many young girls.

MOLLY JENNER'S WAY

OU have nothing to say to me, Mary?"

"γου "I have nothing to say."

"You know you are unfair, dear. I put the money where I thought it would be safe. I bought that stock for Susan. Who had any fear about Midvale Bank ten days ago? You act as if I'd planned to lose the money, as if you thought me a thief, as if, God help me, Mary, after livin' with me 'most thirty years, you hated the sight of me."

The wife's face was set like a mask. Her large eyes looked at Ephraim Jenner, as if they did not see him. Her lips were tightly shut. In her view Ephraim had committed the unpardonable sin. He had been a large stockholder in the Midvale Bank, investing there the savings of many toiling years, and now the bank had been hopelessly wrecked by a dishonest cashier. Word had come to the farm so suddenly that it had stunned both husband and wife, but the man regained his courage first, while the woman was wrapped in a tongue-tied despair. She had not addressed a word to her husband of her own free will since the news came. She moved about the house like a woman under a spell. The atmosphere around her seemed freezing, though the weather was hot and dry, the earth hard-caked by drought, the grass burned to a crisp, and the stubble brown and brittle under the feet.

"Aren't you going to see Susan. graduate, mother?" said Ephraim, speaking again after a pause, in which the silence was so emphatic that the clock ticking in the corner of the living room sounded in his ears as if every