on repeating, and the next
and the next, until you've started something that never stops. If I were
making up the accounts in the Hereafter, I am very sure I'd count it
more to your credit,--the unselfish way you are helping people than all
the lessons you could learn in a term at school. I am not saying half
what I feel. I couldn't. It is too deep down. But, oh, I do want you to
know that your disappointment has not all been in vain."

The voice that uttered the last sentence was tremulous with feeling.
Tears were very near the surface now. Before Lloyd could think of any
reply to her impetuous speech, she had started toward the door.

"Mrs. Moore will wonder what is keeping me," she said, as she turned the
knob. "Good-bye!"

With a lighter heart than Lloyd could have believed possible half an
hour earlier, she went up to her room. Dropping the damp little ball of
a handkerchief into her laundry-bag, she opened a drawer for a fresh
one. By mistake she drew out, not her handkerchief-box, but one that in
some previous haste had been pushed into its place,--the sandalwood box
containing the pearl beads. She took up the uncompleted rosary and began
slipping the beads back and forth over the string,--the string that
would have been two-thirds full by this time if she could have gone on
with school work. Suddenly she looked at it with widening eyes.

"I wondah," she said aloud, "I wondah if I couldn't slip one moah on for
yestahday. She said herself that it ought to count for moah than school
work. In a way she said it was like making 'undying music in the
world.' And what was it old Bishop Chartley said at the carol service?"
She stood with a little pucker on her forehead, trying to recall his
words about keeping the White Feast.

"So may we offer our pearls, days unstained by selfishness." That was
it. She could go on with her rosary then, and, instead of perfect
lessons at school, she could fill the string in token of days spent
unselfishly at home. Days not stained by regrets and tears and idle
repining for what could not be helped.

With a deep sigh of satisfaction, she slipped one more pearl bead down
the string, and laid it back in the box.

"That is for yestahday. I can't count to-day, for I sat for an houah
thinking about my troubles and pitying myself and making myself just as
misahable as possible."

So the little string began to grow again, and, though she was
half-ashamed of the childish pleasure it ga