nd became more
and more beautiful, There was a slight under-current of arch
mischievousness and half petulance which she had never had before, and
which, added to her sweet sympathetic atmosphere, made her indescribably
charming. As she grew stronger she frolicked with every human being and
every living thing. When the spring first opened and she could be out of
doors, she seemed more like a divine mixture of Ariel and Puck than like a
mortal maiden.

I found her one day lying at full length on the threshold of the
greenhouse. Twenty great azaleas were in full bloom on the shelves--white,
pink, crimson. She had gathered handfuls of the fallen blossoms, and was
making her gray kitten, which was as intelligent and as well trained as a
dog, jump into the air to catch them as she tossed them up. I sat down on
the grass outside and watched her silently.

"Oh, you sober old Helen," she said, "you'll be an owl for a thousand
years after you die! Why can't you caper a little? You don't know how nice
it is."

Just then George came slowly walking down the garden path, his hands
clasped behind him, his head bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the
ground.

He did not see us. Annie exclaimed,--

"There's Cousin George, too! Look at him! Wouldn't you think he had just
heard he was to be executed at twelve to-day! I don't see what ails
everybody."

"George, George," she called, "come here. For how many years are you
sentenced, dear, and how could you have been so silly as to be found out?"
And then she burst into a peal of the most delicious laughter at his
bewildered look.

"I don't know, darling, for how many years I am sentenced. We none of us
know," he said, in a tone which was sadder than he meant it should be, and
sobered her loving heart instantly. She sprang to her feet, and threw both
her arms around his right arm, a pretty trick she had kept from her
babyhood, and said,--

"Oh you dear, good darling, does anything really trouble you? How
heartless I am. But you don't know how it feels to have been so awfully
ill, and then to get well again. It makes one feel all body and no soul;
but I have soul enough to love you all dearly, you know I have; and I
won't have you troubled; tell me what it is this minute;" and she looked
at him with tears in her eyes.

One wonders often if there be any limit to human endurance. If there be,
who can say he has reached it? Each year we find that the thing which we
thought had taken