The right and the wrong are the reins with which we are guided into
the very best, sooner or later; yes,--sooner _and_ later. If we will
go God's way, we shall have manifold more in this present world, and
in the world to come life everlasting.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

WHAT NOBODY COULD HELP.

Mr. and Mrs. Kirkbright went away to New York on the afternoon of
their marriage.

Miss Euphrasia went up to Brickfields. Sylvie Argenter was to follow
her on Thursday. It had been settled that she should remain with
Desire, who, with her husband, would reach home on Saturday.

It was a sweet, pleasant spring day, when Sylvie Argenter, with some
last boxes and packages, took the northward train for Tillington.

She was going to a life of use and service. She was going into a
home; a home that not only made a fitting place for her in it, and
was perfect in itself, but that, with noble plan and enlargement,
found way to reach its safety and benediction, and the contagion of
its spirit, over souls that would turn toward it, come under its
rule, and receive from it, as their only shelter and salvation; over
a neighborhood that was to be a planting of Hope,--a heavenly
feudality.

Sylvie's own dreams of a possible future for herself were only
purple lights upon a far horizon.

It seemed a very great way off, any bringing to speech and result
the mute, infrequent signs of what was yet the very real, secret
strength and joy and hope of her girl's heart.

She had a thought of Rodney Sherrett that she was sure she had a
right to. That was all she wanted, yet. Of course, Rodney was not
ready to marry; he was too young; he was not much older than she
was, and that was very young for a man. She did not even think about
it; she recognized the whole position without thinking.

She remembered vividly the little way-station in Middlesex, where he
had bought the ferns, that day in last October; she thought of him
as the train ran slowly alongside the platform at East Keaton. She
wondered if he would not sometimes come up for a Sunday; to spend it
with his uncle and his Aunt Euphrasia. It was a secret gladness to
her that she was to be where he partly, and very affectionately,
belonged. She was sure she should see him, now and then. Her life
looked pleasant to her, its current setting alongside one current,
certainly, of his.

She sat thinking how he had come up behind her that day in the
drawing-room car, and of all the happy nons