a home like this, Miss Wetheridge, for one like mine."

"Should it be my fortune to do so--and why may it not?--I hope I
may accept of my lot with your courage, Miss Jocelyn, and give to
my humbler home the same impress of womanly refinement that you
have imparted to yours. Believe me, I respected you and your mother
thoroughly the moment I crossed your threshold."

"I will do whatever you wish me to do," was her relevant, although
seemingly irrelevant, reply.

"That's a very big promise," said Miss Wetheridge vivaciously; "we
will shake hands to bind the compact," and her attendant raised
his hat as politely as he would to any of his companion's friends.

Mildred went home with the feeling that the leaden monotony of
her life was broken. The hand of genuine Christian sympathy, not
charity or patronage, had been reached across the chasm of her
poverty, and by it she justly hoped that she might be led into
new relations that would bring light and color into her shadowed
experience.

With her mother and Belle she went to the chapel on the following
Sunday afternoon, and found her new friend on the watch for them.
The building was plain but substantial, and the audience-room large
and cheerful looking. Mr. Woolling was, in truth, not the type of
the tall, rugged-featured man who sat on the platform pulpit, and
Mildred, at first, was not prepossessed in his favor, but as he
rose and began to speak she felt the magnetism of a large heart
and brain; and when he began to preach she found herself yielding