confronted with the world of wealth and fashion and conventional
religion, and fresh from a circle where, whatever the errors held
and promulgated, the life was so desperately earnest, often so nobly
self-denying. He knew that Mr. Fane-Smith, good man as he was, must have
been about the severest of trials to a new-born faith. He understood how
Mr. Cuthbert's malice would tend to reawaken the harsh class judgment
against which, as a Christian, Erica was bound to struggle. He could
fully realize the irritated, ruffled state she was in she was overdone,
and wanted perfect rest and quiet, perfect love and sympathy. He and
his wife gave her all these, took her not only to their house, but right
into their home, and how to do this no one knew so well as Donovan,
perhaps because he had once been in much the same position himself. It
was his most leisure month, the time he always devoted to home and wife
and children, so that Erica saw a great deal of him. He seemed to her
the ideal head of an ideal yet real home. It was one of those homes and
thank God there are such! where belief in the Unseen reacts upon the
life in the seen, making it so beautiful, so lovable, that, when you go
out once more into the ordinary world you go with a widened heart, and
the realization that the kingdom of Heaven of which Christ spoke does
indeed begin upon earth.

It is strange, in tracing the growth of spontaneous love, to notice how
independent it is of time. Love annihilates time with love, as with
God, time is not. Like the miracles, it brings into use the aeonial
measurement in which "one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years
is one day." A week, even a few hours, may give us love and knowledge
and mutual sympathy with one which the intercourse of many years fails
to give with another.

The week at Oakdene was one which all her life long Erica looked back
to with the loving remembrance which can gild and beautify the most
sorrowful of lives. It is surely a mistake to think that the memory
of past delights makes present pain sharper. If not, why do we all
so universally strive to make the lives of children happy? Is it not
because we know that happiness in the present will give a sort of
reflected happiness even in the saddest future? Is it not because we
know how in life's bitterest moments, its most barren and desolate
paths, we feel a warmth about our heart, a smile upon our lips, when
we remember the old home days with their eag