id Cecilia
indignantly. "And he afterwards talked of--of--my voice, and said I had
a heavenly gift," she added, with a slight quiver of her lip.

Aunt Vashti regarded the girl sharply.

"And you may thank the Lord for that heavenly gift," she said, in a
slightly lowered voice; "for ef ye hadn't to use it tonight, I'd shut
ye up in your room, to make it pay for yer foolish gaddin' TONGUE! And
I reckon I'll escort ye to chapel tonight myself, miss, and get shut o'
some of this foolishness."

II.

The broad plaza of the Mission de la Concepcion had been baking in the
day-long sunlight. Shining drifts from the outlying sand dunes, blown
across the ill-paved roadway, radiated the heat in the faces of the few
loungers like the pricking of liliputian arrows, and invaded even the
cactus hedges. The hot air visibly quivered over the dark red tiles of
the tienda roof as if they were undergoing a second burning. The black
shadow of a chimney on the whitewashed adobe wall was like a door or
cavernous opening in the wall itself; the tops of the olive and pear
trees seen above it were russet and sere already in the fierce light.
Even the moist breath of the sea beyond had quite evaporated before it
crossed the plaza, and now rustled the leaves in the Mission garden with
a dry, crepitant sound.

Nevertheless, it seemed to Cissy Appleby, as she crossed the plaza, a
very welcome change from West Woodlands. Although the late winter rains
had ceased a month ago,--a few days after the revivalist preacher had
left,--the woods around the chapel were still sodden and heavy, and the
threatened improvement in its site had not taken place. Neither had the
preacher himself alluded to it again; his evening sermon--the only other
one he preached there--was unexciting, and he had, in fact, left West
Woodlands without any display of that extraordinary exhortatory faculty
for which he was famous. Yet Cissy, in spite of her enjoyment of the
dry, hot Mission, remembered him, and also recalled, albeit poutingly,
his blunt suggesting that she was "pining for it." Nevertheless, she
would like to have sung for him HERE--supposing it was possible to
conceive of a Sidon Brotherhood Chapel at the Mission. It was a great
pity, she thought, that the Sidon Brotherhood and the Franciscan
Brotherhood were not more brotherly TOWARDS EACH OTHER. Cissy belonged
to the former by hereditary right, locality, and circumstance, but it is
to be feared that her the