d to
want to try for one more chance.'

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CRASH.

Late and early at employ;
Still on thy golden stores intent;
Thy summer in heaping and hoarding is spent,
What thy winter will never enjoy.
SOUTHEY.

'Stitch! stitch!' said James Frost, entering the nursery on a fine
August evening, and finding his wife with the last beams of sunshine
glistening on her black braids of hair, as she sat singing and working
beside the cot where slept, all tossed and rosy, the yearling child.
'Stitch! stitch! If I could but do needlework!'

'Ah!' said Isabel, playfully, lifting up a sweeter face than had ever
been admired in Miss Conway, 'if you will make your kittens such little
romps, what would you have but mending?'

'Is it my fault? I am very sorry I entailed such a business on you.
You were at that frock when I went to evening prayers at the Union, and
it is not mended yet.'

'Almost; and see what a perfect performance it is, all the spots
joining as if they had never been rent. I never was so proud of
anything as of my mending capabilities. Besides, I have not been doing
it all the time: this naughty little Fanny was in such a laughing mood,
that she would neither sleep herself nor let the rest do so; and Kitty
rose up out of her crib, and lectured us all. Now, don't wake
them--no, you must not even kiss the twin cherries; for if they have
one of papa's riots, they will hardly sleep all night.'

'Then you must take me away; it is like going into a flower-garden, and
being told not to gather.'

'Charlotte is almost ready to come to them, and in the meantime here is
something for you to criticise,' said she, taking from the recess of
her matronly workbasket a paper with a pencilled poem, on the Martyrs
of Carthage, far more terse and expressive than anything she used to
write when composition was the object of the day. James read and
commented, and was disappointed when they broke off short-- 'Ah! there
baby woke.'

'Some day I shall give you a subject. Do you know how Sta. Francesca
Romana found in letters of gold the verse of the Psalm she had been
reading, and from which she had been five times called away to attend
to her household duties?'

'I thought you were never to pity me again--'

'Do you call that pitying you?'

'Worse,' said Isabel, smiling.

'Well, then, what I came for was to ask if you can put on your bonnet,
and take