I shall have to reclaim some of your scholars; you have
been teaching too much to-day."

"No--" she said,--"I have had no chance."

"No chance to teach too much? And why?"

"Why," she said--"I had only the usual hour this morning. I could do no
more."

"You look as if you had been teaching all day--or taught, which is but
another branch. What did my boys say to you?"

"I think they thought they were saying to you, Mr. Linden,--they
behaved so well."

He smiled.

"I don't believe even your conjuring powers could bring about such a
hallucination, Miss Faith.--What a day it has been! Look at that
sunlight and think of the city that hath 'no need of the sun'!"

She looked where he bade her, but the contrast was a little too strong
just then with the earth that had so much 'need' of it! Only the
extreme gravity of her face however indicated anything of the struggle
going on. Her eye did not move,--nor eyelid.

"_That_ is the only rest we must wait 'for,'" Mr. Linden said. "That
'remaineth.'"

Faith answered nothing. But after a little while the shadow of that
sunlight passed away from her face, and she turned to the couch again
and asked with her former gentle expression,

"Will you have tea up here, Mr. Linden?"

"I'm afraid I must," he said, looking up at her with eyes that rather
questioned than answered.

"Does mother know what you would like to have?"

"Miss Faith--I wish you would tell me just what is troubling you."

The question flushed her a little, and for a moment her face was a
quick play of light and shade; then she said,

"It troubled me not to see you looking better."

He took the force of her words, though he answered lightly.

"I suppose I do look rather frightful! But Miss Faith, I hope to get
over that in a few days--you must try and brace up your nerves, because
if you cannot bear the sight of me I shall have to deny myself the
sight of you."

"Don't do that," she said, the light coming into her eye and voice as
if by an actual sunbeam. "Then it is true, what you wrote me last
night, Mr. Linden?"

"Well!" he said--"I am not much in the habit of maintaining my own
words,--however, in this case I am willing to admit them true. If it
will be any relief to your mind, Miss Faith, I will promise to remain
in seclusion until you say I am fit to be seen down stairs."

The answer to that was only a rosy little smile, like the sunlight
promise of fair weather on the last clouds that fl