about you, and heard from him
just how good you are, and how you help him in the Sunday-school and
everywhere, visiting the poor, picking up ragged children and doing
things I never thought of doing; but I am not going to be so useless
any longer, and the next time you visit some of the very miserablest I
want you to take me with you. Do you ever meet Arthur there? Oh, here
he comes," and with a bound, Lucy darted away from Anna toward the
spot where the rector stood receiving Mrs. and Miss Hetherton's
greeting.

As Lucy had said, she had driven by the rectory, with no earthly
object but the hope of seeing the rector, and had hurt him cruelly
with her questionings of Anna, and annoyed him a little with her
anxious inquiries as to the cause of his pallid face and sunken eyes;
but she was so bewitchingly pretty, and so thoroughly kind withal,
that he could not be annoyed long, and he felt better for having seen
her bright, coquettish face, and listened to her childish prattle. It
was a great trial for him to attend the picnic that afternoon, but he
met it bravely, and schooled himself to appear as if there were no
such things in the world as aching hearts and cruel disappointments.
His face was very pale, but his recent headache would account for
that, and he acted his part successfully, shivering a little, it is
true, when Anna expressed her sorrow that he should suffer so often
from these attacks, and suggested that he take a short vacation and go
with them to Saratoga.

"I should so much like to have you," she said, and her clear, honest
eyes looked him straight in the face, as she asked why he could not.

"What does she mean?" the rector thought. "Is she trying to tantalize
me? I expected her to be natural, as her aunt laid great stress on
that, but she need not overdo the matter by showing me how little she
cares for having hurt me so."

Then, as a flash of pride came to his aid, he thought, "I will at
least be even with her. She shall not have the satisfaction of
guessing how much I suffer," and as Lucy then called to him from the
opposite side of the lawn, he asked Anna to accompany him thither,
just as he would have done a week before. Once that afternoon he found
himself alone with her in a quiet part of the woods, where the long
branches of a great oak came nearly to the ground, and formed a little
bower which looked so inviting that Anna sat down upon the gnarled
roots of the tree, and, tossing her hat upo