amma," said Rose.

"It must be a great delight to them all at the parsonage."

"I suppose so, mamma. I wish Phil were here," said Rose again, in a
plaintive little tone.

"I wish he were, my child; it might have a good influence upon him: and
poor Adele, too; she must surely listen to Reuben, he is so earnest and
impassioned. Don't you think so, Rose?"

Rose is working with nervous rapidity.

"But, my child," says the mother; "are you not sewing that breadth upon
the wrong side?"

True enough, upon the wrong side,--so many weary stitches to undo!

Miss Eliza had shown a well-considered approval of Reuben's change of
opinions; but this had not forbidden a certain reserve of worldly regret
that he should give up so promising a business career. She had half
hinted as much to the Doctor.

"I do not see, brother," she had said, "that his piety will involve the
abandonment of mercantile life."

"His piety," said the Doctor, "if it be of the right stamp, will involve
an obedience to conscience."

And there the discussion had rested. The spinster received Reuben with
much warmth, in which her stately proprieties of manner, however, were
never for one moment forgotten.

Adele, who was now fortunately in a fair way of recovery, but who was
still very weak, and who looked charmingly in her white chamber-dress
with its simple black belt, received him with a tender-heartedness of
manner which he had never met in her before. The letter of Reuben had
been given her, and, with all its rawness of appeal, had somehow touched
her religious sentiment in a way it had never been touched before. He
had put so much of his youthful enthusiasm into his language, it showed
such an elasticity of hope and joy, as impressed her very strangely. It
made the formal homilies of Miss Eliza seem more harsh than ever. She
had listened, in those fatiguing and terrible days of illness, to psalms
long drawn out, and wearily; but here was some wild bird that chanted a
glorious carol in her ear,--a carol that seemed touched with Heaven's
own joy. And under its influence--exaggerated as it was by extreme
youthful emotion--she seemed to see the celestial gates of jasper and
pearl swing open before her, and the beckonings of the great crowd of
celestial inhabitants to enter and enjoy.

For a long time she had been hovering (how nearly she did not know) upon
the confines of the other world; but with a vague sense that its
mysteries might open upon he