"Come and live with me, Miss Marston," said Hesper; but it was with a
laugh, and that light touch of the tongue which suggests but a flying
fancy spoken but for the sake of the preposterous; while Mary, not
forgetting she had heard the same thing once before, heard it with a
smile, and had no rejoinder ready; whereupon Hesper, who was, in
reality, feeling her way, ventured a little more seriousness.

"I should never ask you to do anything you would not like," she said.

"I don't think you could," answered Mary. "There are more things I
should like to do for you than you would think to ask.--In fact," she
added, looking round with a loving smile, "I don't know what I
shouldn't like to do for you."

"My meaning was, that, as a thing of course, I should never ask you to
do anything menial," explained Hesper, venturing a little further
still, and now speaking in a tone perfectly matter-of-fact.

"I don't know what you intend by _menial_," returned Mary.

Hesper thought it not unnatural she should not be familiar with the
word, and proceeded to explain it as well as she could. That seeming
ignorance may be the consequence of more knowledge, she had yet to
learn.

"_Menial_, don't you know?" she said, "is what you give servants to do."

But therewith she remembered that Mary's help in certain things wherein
her maid's incapacity was harrowing, was one of the hopes she mainly
cherished in making her proposal: that definition of _menial_ would
hardly do.

"I mean--I mean," she resumed, with a little embarrassment, a rare
thing with her, "--things like--like--cleaning one's shoes, don't you
know?--or brushing your hair."

Mary burst out laughing.

"Let me come to you to-morrow morning," she said, "and I will brush
your hair that you will want me to come again the next day. You
beautiful creature! whose hands would not be honored to handle such
stuff as that?"

As she spoke, she took in her fingers a little stray drift from the
masses of golden twilight that crowned one of the loveliest temples in
which the Holy Ghost had not yet come to dwell.

"If cleaning your shoes be menial, brushing your hair must be royal,"
she added.

Hesper's heart was touched; and if at the same time her _self_ was
flattered, the flattery was mingled with its best antidote--love.

"Do you really mean," she said, "you would not mind doing such things
for me?--Of course I should not be exacting."

She laughed again, afraid of showing