lumber in younger hands? For a little while she leans her sweet young
bosom against it, and writes scented letters in a girlish hand to a
little red-headed boy who has these past weeks begun to love her. Can it
be possible that the desk on which Esther once wrote to her little Mike
will ever hear itself spoken of as "this ugly old thing"? Let us
hope not.




CHAPTER III


OF THE LOVE OF HENRY AND ESTHER

Father and son had both meant what they said; and even the mother, for
whom it would be the cruellest wrench of all, knew that Henry was going
to leave home. Not literally on the morrow, for the following evening he
had appeared before his father to apologise for the manner--carefully
for the manner, not _the matter_,--in which he had spoken to him the
evening before, and asked for a day or two in which to make his
arrangements for departure. James Mesurier was too strong a man to be
resentful, and he accepted his son's apology with a gentleness that, as
each knew, detracted nothing from the resolution which each had come to.

"My boy," he said, "you will never have such good friends as your father
and mother; but it is best that you go out into the world to learn it."

There is something terribly winning and unnerving to the blackest
resolution, when the severity of the strong dissolves for a brief moment