ailed and gone wrong, or
have perhaps hardly ever had any right chances. Do you think we
could manage it so as to _keep_ it a place of refuge and new
beginning, and not let it spoil itself?"

"With the right people at each end, why not?" said Desire. "But O,
Mr. Kirkbright! how can I tell you! It is such a great idea; and I
don't know anything."

These words, that she happened to say, brought back to her--by one
of those little lightning threads that hold things together, and
flash and thrill our recollections through us--the rainy morning
when she went round in the storm to her Aunt Ripwinkley's, because
she could not sit in the bay-window at home, and wonder whether "it
was all finished," or whether anybody had got to contrive anything
more, "before they could sit behind plate-glass and let it rain."
She remembered it all by those same words that she had spoken then
to Rachel Froke,--"Behold, we know not anything,--Tennyson and I!"

Nonsense stays by us, often, in stickier fashion than sense does;
that is the good of nonsense, perhaps; it sticks, and draws the
sense along after it.

"I think one thing is certain," said Mr. Kirkbright. "Human
creatures are made for 'moving on.' I believe the Swedenborgians are
right in this,--that the places above, or below, are filled from the
human race, or races; and that the Lord Himself couldn't do much
with beings made as He has made us, without places to _move us
into_. New beginnings,--evenings and mornings; the very planet
cannot go on its way without making them for itself. Life bound down
to poor conditions,--and all conditions are poor in the sense of
being limited while the life is resistlessly expanding,--festers;
fevers; breaks out in violence and disease. I believe we want new
places more than anything. I came up here on purpose to see if I
could not begin one."

"How happened you to come just here?" questioned Desire. "What could
you know of this, beforehand?"

"My sister had Miss Argenter's letter; and at once she remembered
the name of the place and its story. That is the way things come
together, you know. My brother-in-law, Mr. Sherrett, owns, or did
own, this whole property. A 'dead stick,' he thought it. Well,
Aaron's rod was another dead stick. But he laid it up before the
Lord, and it blossomed."

Desire sat silent, looking at the white water in its gracious hurry.
Pouring itself away, unused,--unheeded; yet waiting there, pouring
always. The tireles