at and was ready to go. The day was
slipping away and before him there were thirty miles and a train to be
caught.

"We must not be hurried, my children," he said, standing by the boy
and girl. "The Sacred Heart Academy at Athens is the best school this
side of Albany. The Mother Superior will write you in a few days,
telling you when and how to come. If you are ready to go, you will go
as she directs.

"You have been a good, brave little girl. A soldier's daughter could
be no more, nor less. God bless you now, and you, too, my boy," he
added.

When he was settled on the sled with Arsene and they were rounding the
shoulder of Lansing Mountain, where the pony had broken the trace, he
turned to look back at the cabin in the hemlocks.

"To-day," he said to himself, "I have set two ambitious, eager souls
upon the high and stony paths of the great world. Should I have left
them where they were?

"I shall never know whether I did right or not. Even time will mix
things up so that I'll never be able to tell. Maybe some day God will
let me see. But why should he? One can only aim right, and trust in
Him."

II

THE CHOIR UNSEEN

Ruth Lansing sat in one of the music rooms of the Sacred Heart convent
in Athens thrumming out a finger exercise that a child of six would
have been able to do as well as she.

It was a strange, little, closely-crowded world, this, into which she
had been suddenly transplanted. It was as different from the great
world that she had come out to see as it was from the wild, sweet life
of the hills where she had ruled and managed everything within reach.
Mainly it was full of girls of her own age whose talk and thoughts
were of a range entirely new to her.

She compared herself with them and knew that they were really children
in the comparison. Their talk was of dress and manners and society and
the thousand little and big things that growing girls look forward to.
She knew that in any real test, anything that demanded common sense
and action, she was years older than they. But they had things that
she did not have.

They talked of things that she knew nothing about. They could walk
across waxed floors as though waxed floors were meant to be walked
on. They could rise to recite lessons without stammering or choking
as she did. They could take reproof jauntily, where she, who had never
in her life received a scolding, would have been driven into
hysterics. They could wear new dresses