l. The process may be botanically interesting,
but there is something a little sickly about it, too there is a feeling
that, after all, the acorn would have done better in its natural ground
hidden away in darkness.

And, if we have this feeling with regard to vegetable growth, how much
more with regard to spiritual growth! To attempt to set up the gradually
awakening spirit in an apparatus where it might be the observed of all
observers would be at once repulsive and presumptuous. Happily, it is
impossible. We may trace influences and suggestions, just as we may note
the rain or drought, the heat or cold that affect vegetable growth, but
the actual birth is ever hidden.

To attempt even to shadow forth Erica's growth during the next year
would be worse than presumptuous. As to her outward life it was not
greatly changed, only intensified. October always began their busiest
six months. There was the night school at which she was able to work
again indefatigably. There were lectures to be attended. Above all there
was an ever-increasing amount of work to be done for her father. In all
the positive and constructive side of secularism, in all the efforts
made by it to better humanity, she took an enthusiastic share. Naturally
she did not see so much of Charles Osmond now that she was strong again.
In the press of business, in the hard, every-day life there was little
time for discussion. They met frequently, but never for one of their
long tete-a-tetes. Perhaps Erica purposely avoided them. She was
strangely different now from the little impetuous girl who had come to
his study years ago, trembling with anger at the lady superintendent's
insult. Insults had since then, alas, become so familiar to her, that
she had acquired a sort of patient dignity of endurance, infinitely sad
to watch in such a young girl.

One morning in early June, just a year after the memorable Hyde Park
meeting, Charles Osmond happened to be returning from the death bed of
one of his parishioners when, at the corner of Guilford Square, he met
Erica. It might have been in part the contrast with the sad and painful
scene he had just quitted, but he thought she had never before looked so
beautiful. Her face seemed to have taken to itself the freshness and the
glow of the summer morning.

"You are early abroad," he said, feeling older and grayer and more tired
than ever as he paused to speak to her.

"I am off to the museum to read," she said, "I li