eries of conflicts
to the very end. Still he hoped for relief from the load of debt, and
looked forward to the reestablishment of his home.

Brian Osmond heard of the plans before long, but he scarcely saw Erica;
the Christmas holidays began, and he no longer met her each afternoon
in Gower Street, while the time drew nearer and nearer for her departure
for Paris. At length, on the very last day, it chanced that they were
once more thrown together.

Raeburn was a great lover of flowers, and he very often received
floral offerings from his followers. It so happened that some beautiful
hot-house flowers had been sent to him from a nursery garden one day in
January, and, unwilling to keep them all, he had suggested that Erica
should take some to the neighboring hospitals. Now there were two
hospitals in Guilford Square; Erica felt much more interested in the
children's hospital than in the one for grown-up people; but, wishing to
be impartial she arranged a basketful for each, and well pleased to have
anything to give, hastened on her errand. Much to her delight, her first
basket of flowers was not only accepted very gratefully, but the lady
superintendent took her over the hospital, and let her distribute the
flowers among the children. She was very fond of children, and was as
happy as she could be passing up and down among the little beds, while
her bright manner attracted the little ones, and made them unusually
affectionate and responsive.

Happy at having been able to give them pleasure, and full of tender,
womanly thoughts, she crossed the square to another small hospital; she
was absorbed in pitiful, loving humanity, had forgotten altogether
that the world counted her as a heretic, and wholly unprepared for what
awaited her, she was shown into the visitors' room and asked to give her
name. Not only was Raeburn too notorious a name to pass muster, but the
head of the hospital knew Erica by sight, and had often met her out of
doors with her father. She was a stiff, narrow-minded, uncompromising
sort of person, and, in her own words was "determined to have no
fellowship with the works of darkness." How she could consider
bright-faced Erica, with her loving thought for others and her free
gift, a "work of darkness," it is hard to understand. She was not at all
disposed, however, to be under any sort of obligation to an atheist, and
the result of it was that after a three minutes' interview, Erica found
herself once