ind him not to go out calling without some of this in his
pocket for the children.

Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
be described by the word "sulky." Great allowance was to be made, he
realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and
again by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent
her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners
who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated
to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced,
in doing so, an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces
anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they
went out together, he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work
unaided.

This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges.
Why, she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in
Tyre. What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?

Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not
be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him
an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a
flower-garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine,
digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her
plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of
physical well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.

Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation
which at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was
so much a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and
over again that he was glad. Only--only, sometimes the thought WOULD
force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her
time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning
friends for them in the Garden of the Lord--friends whom they were going
to need badly.

The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and
against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already
won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had