"Yes," said the girl, "perhaps it is that. That is what Mrs. Graves
thinks. Do you know, it seems to me strange that you have never
been here before, though you are almost her only relation. She is
the most wonderful person I have ever seen. The only person I know
who seems always right, and yet never wants anyone else to know she
is right."

"Yes," said Howard, "I feel that I have been very foolish--but it
has been going on all the time, like the music and the light. It
hasn't been wasted. I have had a wonderful talk with her to-day--
the most wonderful talk, I think, I have ever had. I can't
understand it all yet--but she has given me the sense of some fine
purpose--as if I had been kept away for a purpose, because I was
not ready; and as if I had come here for a purpose now."

The girl sate looking at him with open eyes, and with some strange
sense of surprise. "Yes," she said, "it is just like that; but that
you could have seen it so soon amazes me. I have known her all my
life, and could never have put that into words. Do you know how
things seem to come and go and shift about without any meaning? It
is never so with her; she sees what it all means. I cannot explain
it."

They sate in silence for a moment, and then Howard said: "It is
very curious to be here; you know, or probably you don't know, how
much interested I am in Jack; and somehow in talking to him I felt
that there was something behind--something more to know. All this"--
he waved his hand at the room--"my aunt, your father, yourself--it
does not seem to me new and unfamiliar, but something which I have
always known. I can't tell you in what a dream I have seemed to be