darky too proud!”

She did not enter with quite as much enthusiasm into Kate’s description of the threshing machine, and reverted with a sigh to the days when the thresher was content with his flail, an instrument which she extolled as being “a heap safer than that great snorting machine” (she persisted in confounding its functions with those of the engine); and she refused to share in Kate’s wonder that people didn’t starve in those days waiting for the grain to be threshed.

The two were still discussing harvests past and present when Esther, feeling that she had done her full duty there, left the kitchen. She had never held quite the place in Milly’s affections which Kate enjoyed, nor had she of late years listened with her sister’s contentment to the old woman’s thrice-told tales. She left them now and went to seek her mother.

Mrs. Northmore was seated on the cool veranda with her hands in her lap, and that look of tired content which tells of a busy but successful day. A generous hospitality had left her a little worn. Esther sat down on the step at her feet and leaned her arms across her lap in a childish fashion she had never outgrown.

“I wish I didn’t get so tired of people whom I really like,” she said. “It would break Aunt Milly’s heart if she knew how she bores me. It seems to me sometimes I get tired of everybody—everybody but you, mother dear.”

Mrs. Northmore looked into her daughter’s eyes with a smile.

“I don’t think I should feel hurt, my dear, if you wanted to get away from me, too, sometimes. Nobody quite suits all our moods. I wouldn’t reproach myself on that score, if I were you.”

“But it seems so disloyal, when it’s anybody—anybody that you really care a great deal about,” said Esther. Her mother’s smile kept its tinge of amusement, and the girl’s face grew more serious.

“I wonder sometimes if I’m made like other girls,” she said. “It isn’t just getting tired of people. It’s getting tired of things in general, and longing for something larger than anything that comes into my life. I don’t know as I can make you understand quite what I mean,” she went on, a strained note creeping into her voice, “but somehow it came over me to-day more strongly than it ever did before that I could never be satisfied just to live out my life in the common humdrum way. Perhaps it was the talk of those women. I suppose they’re just as good and useful as the average, but it seemed as if they thought there was nothing in the world for women to do but to be married, and keep house, and take care of children. Even Mrs. Elwell, nice as she is, appeared to think so, and it all seemed to me so poor and small. I almost despised them, mother.”

The smile had gone now from Mrs. Northmore’s eyes. “Oh, my dear!” she said; and then she was silent. Of what use would it be to tell this child, with the experiences of life all untried, that the common lot, which she despised, had in its round the truest joys and deepest satisfactions? Years and love and happy work must bring the knowledge of that. She stroked the brown head for a moment without speaking. It was Esther who found words first.

“You never felt like those women, did you, mother? You don’t seem a bit like them. You are always reading and thinking, and you know about a thousand things they’ve never thought of.”

The smile came back to Mrs. Northmore’s eyes, but there was a touch of sadness in it. “My dear girl,” she said, “I’m not half as wise as you think I am; but if I have any wisdom I’m sure I’ve found most of it, and my happiness too, in those same common things. There isn’t such a difference between me and those friends of ours as you imagine.”

The girl looked unconvinced. Presently she said, with a sigh, “If one could only be something or do something! When I think of the people who have been great—the heroes, the poets, the artists, people who have accomplished something that lasted—they seem to me the only ones who have been really happy. Just to be one of the mass, and live, and die, and be forgotten, seems so pitiful.”

There had never been any closed doors between Mrs. Northmore’s heart and her daughters. She had been the friend and confidante of each, and she knew this mood of Esther’s; but the day had deepened its color to an unusual sombreness. The girl had never before disclosed a feeling quite like this, and for once the mother was at a loss how to help her. To say that all could not be great was trite, and had no comfort in it.

“I think we often make a mistake in our envying of the great,” she said gently. “The happiness to them was not in being known and remembered beyond others; few of them knew in their lifetime that this would be true of them, or even the value of their work to the world. The real happiness lay in doing with success the thing they cared to do. To know our work and do it, Esther, not the sort of work nor the reward, but the finding and doing—that is the true joy of the greatest, and it is open to us all.”

She had spoken with simple seriousness, as she always did when others brought her their troubles, however fanciful. Perhaps the girl did not grasp the thought, or, grasping, find the comfort in it.

“But it seems to me that some of us have no special work to do, nor any special faculty for doing it,” she said. “Here am I, for instance. What am I good for? I seem to myself to be just one of those creatures who are made for nothing but to fill up the spaces between the people who amount to something.”

Mrs. Northmore pressed her hand for a moment lightly on the dark appealing eyes of the girl. “If we are in earnest,” she said gently, “and if it is usefulness, not praise that we are caring about, we shall find our work; and be sure it will seem special to us if we love it as we ought.”

There were a few minutes of silence; then the girl said more quietly, but with a note of despondence in her voice: “If I had gone to school longer and tried to fit myself for something, perhaps I might have found out what I was good for. I didn’t care much when I left Lance Hall, and I never studied as hard as I might while I was there; but I’ve thought more about it since then.”

A look of pain came into Mrs. Northmore’s face. It was a regret the girl had never expressed before, but one which had been often in her own thoughts. Yet the year in boarding-school, which had followed Esther’s graduation from the high school, had been all that Dr. Northmore could afford to give his daughter. She was considered in the region quite an accomplished girl, but her mother, at least, realized what a broader and more serious education might have done for her. She realized it at this moment with unusual force.

“I wish you might have had the best the schools can give, and some other things you have missed, Esther,” she said. And then she added, “If we were only a little richer!”

There was a tone in Mrs. Northmore’s voice which one heard but seldom, and the girl noted it with a sudden compunction. “I haven’t missed anything that I deserved to have,” she said quickly, “and I’ve had more than most girls. I know that. It’s you who go without things, mother. You’re always planning and saving, and pretending you don’t want to have anything or go anywhere.” And then the impatience came into her tone again, though she was not thinking of herself, as she added, “Sometimes I can’t see how it is that we have so little money to spend, when father has such a good practice.”

Mrs. Northmore sighed. “Your father has never looked very sharply after his own interests in money matters. He has been too busy with other things, and too generous, for that,” she said. And then she added, almost gayly: “But I have never lacked for anything; and it is so much easier to bear the sort of mistakes your father makes than it would be to bear some