se. "Try and remember it. `When Poverty comes in
at the door, Love flies out of the window.' There never was a truer
word spoken."

She leant back in her chair. The interview was ended. Iris's visit to
Paradise Court was over.

But not the memory of it, that dwelt freshly in her mind for years; and
when Susie and Dottie demanded again and again to be told how the duck
sat under the bee-hive, or how Iris had driven from Dinham in the
donkey-cart, the whole place came before her like a brightly painted
picture. And in the picture were two things which it pleased her most
to look at and remember--Miss Munnion's face when she had kissed her at
the gate, and Moore's when he thanked her for fetching the "stuff for
the little un,"--these always stood out clearly, even when the
background of Paradise Court became dim and indistinct. Neither were
her godmother's parting words and her proverb forgotten. Sometimes in
after years, when Iris came to know what poverty really means, and when
difficulties and troubles rose in Albert Street which a little more
money would have relieved, she thought of them mournfully. Poverty had
indeed come in at the door, and it might have been in her power to keep
it out. She could not do that now, she had missed her "chance," as Mrs
Fotheringham had said; but there still remained one other thing--Love
should not fly out of the window. And he never did. Many hands, some
of them small and weak, held him fast in 29 Albert Street, and he was
always to be found there, though he might hide himself for a time.

"After all," said Iris to herself, "there are flowers here as well as in
Paradise Court!"

And so there were. There is a crop that flourishes sometimes better in
the hard soil of poverty and labour than where beauty, culture, art, and
all that wealth can produce spread their soft influences. These are the
flowers called patience, unselfishness, simplicity, love. They grow
best, not where life is most pleasant to the senses, but where cold
winds often blow roughly and outward things are ugly and poor.

"Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing more courageous, nothing higher,
nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller nor better in
heaven and earth."--_Thomas a Kempis_.

THE END.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Pair of Clogs, by Amy Walton

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