or the murders and massacres of our forefathers. But then he
remembered that he himself had gone through the same course in his
boyhood, so that it must be all right. Ansgarius would be a man of
peace none the less--and if not! "Well, everything is in the hand
of Providence," said the Pastor confidingly, and set to work again
at his sermon.

"You're quite forgetting your lunch to-day, father," said a blond
head in the door-way.

"Why, so I am, Rebecca; I'm a whole hour too late," answered the
father, and went at once into the dining-room.

The father and daughter sat down at the luncheon-table. Ansgarius
was always his own master on Saturdays, when the Pastor was taken
up with his sermon.

You would not easily have found two people who suited each other
better, or who lived on terms of more intimate friendship, than the
Pastor and his eighteen-year-old daughter. She had been motherless
from childhood; but there was so much that was womanly in her
gentle, even-tempered father, that the young girl, who remembered
her mother only as a pale face that smiled on her, felt the loss
rather as a peaceful sorrow than as a bitter pain.

And for him she came to fill up more and more, as she ripened, the
void that had been left in his soul; and all the tenderness, which
at his wife's death had been se clouded in sorrow and longing, now
gathered around the young woman who grew up under his eyes; so that
his sorrow was assuaged and peace descended upon his mind.