nywhere have I been more peaceful
than in this little room, on which I see you so often cast round your
eyes curiously, perhaps pitifully, my lady."

"It is not at all a fit place for _you_," said Clementina with a touch
of indignation.

"Softly, my lady, lest, without knowing it, your love should make you
sin. Who set thee, I pray, for a guardian angel over my welfare? I could
scarce have a lovelier, true; but where is thy brevet? No, my lady: it
is a greater than thou that sets me the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps
He may give me a palace one day. If I might choose, it would be things
that belong to a cottage--the whiteness and the greenness and the sweet
odors of cleanliness. But the Father has decreed for His children that
they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. Who can
imagine how in this respect things looked to our Lord when He came and
found so little faith on the earth? But perhaps, my lady, you would not
pity my present condition so much if you had seen the cottage in which I
was born, and where my father and mother loved each other, and died
happier than on their wedding-day. There I was happy too until their
loving ambition decreed that I should be a scholar and a clergyman. Not
before then did I ever know anything worthy the name of trouble. A
little cold and a little hunger at times, and not a little restlessness
always, was all. But then--ah, then my troubles began. Yet God, who
bringeth light out of darkness, hath brought good even out of my
weakness and presumption and half-unconscious falsehood. When do you
go?"

"To-morrow morning, as I purpose."

"Then God be with thee! He _is_ with thee, only my prayer is that thou
mayst know it. He is with me, and I know it. He does not find this
chamber too mean or dingy or unclean to let me know Him near me in it."

"Tell me one thing before I go," said Clementina: "are we not commanded
to bear each other's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ? I read
it to-day."

"Then why ask me?"

"For another question: does not that involve the command to those who
have burdens that they should allow others to bear them?"

"Surely, my lady. But _I_ have no burden to let you bear."

"Why should I have everything and you nothing? Answer me that."

"My lady, I have millions more than you, for I have been gathering the
crumbs under my Master's table for thirty years."

"You are a king," answered Clementina. "But a king needs a handmaiden