would never confess his desires, lest they trouble the
Aunties. Perhaps he could understand her case and advise her, and in
an impulsive moment, born of her great need, she told him all about the
cloud that had been hanging over her during the past week.

"I want just dreadfully to go to college and get a good education," she
finished up. "You know all about it, I'm sure you do, don't you,
Gavin? And now I've got my first real chance, and if I take it I'll be
keeping Sandy back. Perhaps I'll be keeping him from being a minister,
and wouldn't that be dreadful? And I don't know what to do."

It did not seem queer, somehow, for her to be asking Gavin's advice
about this momentous question, but his position was especially
difficult. He could not answer her for a few minutes. For he knew
that he was not at all an unbiased judge. Next to his own going, he
wanted more than anything else in the world that Christina should be
left at home. He could hardly bear to think of what life in Orchard
Glen would be like without the chance of looking at her in church or at
meeting, and occasionally speaking to her. Indeed he would not have
dared to take this bold plunge of asking to see her home to-night had
he not known that it would likely be his last chance, and that she
would soon be gone out of his life.

"I am afraid I would want to go if I was in your place," he confessed
at last. "But," he hesitated shyly, "Auntie Elspie always knows what
is best, and she has always told me that we never lose a thing by
giving it up for some one else. She gave up all her chances for
Grandmother Grant and stayed home and cared for her. And she let their
only brother go to college, while she managed the farm at home. And
she says now she is always glad she did it."

He stopped suddenly, embarrassed. It looked as if he had actually had
the presumption to preach Christina a sermon.

But she did not seem to think so. "And you, yourself," she said, "Mr.
Sinclair always wants you to go to college, Gavin, and you know you
would like to, wouldn't you?"

"I am in a very different position from any one like you or Sandy,"
said Gavin with a new note of sternness in his voice. "It is not for
me to choose whether I will go to college or not. But," he added
hastily, "my Aunts would let me go if they could, you may be sure of
that."

Christina's heart felt a sudden rush of sympathy. She guessed what
Gavin must suffer, seeing this boy an