visitor.

"Here you are, May," Annie was saying in glad greeting, as she held her
sister by the two shoulders, after she had kissed her; "and I declare
you have grown since you went to St. Ambrose's. Oh, you incorrigible
girl, when you were so much the tallest of us before you went there."

May could only make one answer with parched lips, faltering tongue, and
eyes dry under their heavy cloud of grief, "Annie, I have failed in my
examination!"

Annie started in surprise, while her face fell for a second. "What a
pity!" she could not help exclaiming. "Father will be----" She broke off
in the middle of the sentence. "Don't fret about it," she added, quickly
taking another look into May's face; "that will do no good, and it is
not very much after all. I cannot stay another minute now, May," she
went on to tell the bewildered girl in the most matter-of-fact tone, so
that May was in danger of feeling half-offended at finding her
tribulation taken so cavalierly--"just like Annie!"

"You must wait for me," Annie was saying further. "There is a poor
fellow--a patient of mine--who is to have his arm amputated this
morning, and I must be with him when it is done."

"Oh dear!" cried May, completely taken aback, "that is dreadful. Will he
die, Annie? Will he die?" forgetting all her own high-strung woes, the
product of an advanced stage of civilization, in heart-felt, human
sympathy with the most primitive of all trials--bodily suffering and
loss.

"Not if we can help it, please God," said Annie emphatically. Then an
inspiration came to her as she gazed on the girl's white quivering face.
"You have been working too hard, 'little May'; you shake your head like
a tragedy queen. Then you've been worrying too much, which is a great
deal worse. I shall take you in hand, but I can't stay to talk about it.
Just you think how little my poor fellow would mind not passing an
examination, in comparison with the loss of an arm--fortunately it is
the left one. He is a printer who got his arm crushed under one of the
great rollers, and he has a wife and five little children dependent on
their bread-winner."

Annie was gone, leaving May suddenly transported out of herself, and
plunged into the trials of her neighbours, the awfully near, common
life-and-death trials, of which she had known so little. Her own seemed
to sink into insignificance beside them. St. Ambrose's and its
intellectual lists and wordy contests, even its lofty abstrus