s a parent can have.

"You'd ought to be kept quiet, Ma," Selina said, after a prolonged
scrutiny. "If you had any suitable book in the house, I'd read to you.
There was one my poor husband used to listen to by the hour in his
last illness--'Preparations for the Final Journey.'"

"I'm going to run down and fetch that stuff I bought to-day to show it
to Ma and get her opinion," Mary Ann interrupted, and a minute later
she was standing by the bed with the three dress lengths piled in
confusion upon her arms. To the woman in the bed it was as if an angel
looked out from over a tumbled rainbow and smiled a message of hope to
her from the sky.

"Take an end of this tartan, will you, Jane, and stand off a little
with it. There, I knew you'd like it, Ma. I said so to Mr. Merrill the
minute he showed it to me. That flowered piece? That's for a morning
wrapper. I know it's gay, but somehow, after the flowers are all over,
I do hanker after gay colors. In summer I don't feel to want them so
much on my back when I can have them in the garden. The gray-blue's
for a company dress. I'll have it made up in time for the reception to
the new minister. You'll need a dress for that too, Ma. We'll get
samples as soon as you're well enough to choose. It was between this
and a shot silk, but I thought this was more becoming at my age. To
tell the truth," confessed Mary Ann with a laugh, "I'd rather have had
it than this, and more than either I'd love to have bought a dress off
a piece of crimson velvet Mr. Merrill had just got in."

She rested an elbow on her knee and sank the length of a forefinger in
her plump cheek.

"When I was a little girl," she ruminated, "I was awfully fond of the
rose-in-campin' that grew in our garden at home--you mind it, mother;
mullein pink, some call it. I used to say to myself that if ever I
could get what clothes I liked, I'd have a dress as near like that as
I could find. Well, there I was to-day looking at the very thing, the
same color, the same downy look, and all, and money enough in my purse
to buy it. Of course I know it would be silly. But don't it seem a
pity that the things we dream of having some day--when the day comes,
we don't want 'em? I feel somehow as if I'm cheating that little girl
that wished for the dress like a rose-in-campin'."

She began to fold the dress pieces thoughtfully. "Made up handsomely
with a train," she said, half to herself, "and worn on suitable
occasions, it wouldn