t last, "Gregory has given me the money he got for
the wagon and oxen, and I have fifty pounds besides that once belonged
to some one. I know what they would have liked to have done with it. You
must take it and go to some place and study for a year or two."

"No, little one, I will not take it," he said, as he planed slowly away;
"the time was when I would have been very grateful to any one who would
have given me a little money, a little help, a little power of gaining
knowledge. But now, I have gone so far alone I may go on to the end. I
don't want it, little one."

She did not seem pained at his refusal, but swung her foot to and fro,
the little old wrinkled forehead more wrinkled up than ever.

"Why is it always so, Waldo, always so?" she said; "we long for things,
and long for them, and pray for them; we would give all we have to come
near to them, but we never reach them. Then at last, too late, just
when we don't want them any more, when all the sweetness is taken out of
them, then they come. We don't want them then," she said, folding
their hands resignedly on her little apron. After a while she added: "I
remember once, very long ago, when I was a very little girl, my mother
had a workbox full of coloured reels. I always wanted to play with them,
but she would never let me. At last one day she said I might take the
box. I was so glad I hardly knew what to do. I ran round the house, and
sat down with it on the back steps. But when I opened the box all the
cottons were taken out."

She sat for a while longer, till the Kaffer maid had finished churning,
and was carrying the butter toward the house. Then Em prepared to slip
off the table, but first she laid her little hand on Waldo's. He stopped
his planing and looked up.

"Gregory is going to the town tomorrow. He is going to give in our bans
to the minister; we are going to be married in three weeks."

Waldo lifted her very gently from the table. He did not congratulate
her; perhaps he thought of the empty box, but he kissed her forehead
gravely.

She walked away toward the house, but stopped when she got half-way. "I
will bring you a glass of buttermilk when it is cool," she called out;
and soon her clear voice came ringing out through the back windows as
she sang the "Blue Water" to herself, and washed the butter.

Waldo did not wait till she returned. Perhaps he had at last really
grown weary of work; perhaps he felt the wagon-house chilly (for he had