SANCTUARY.

The church which the Order had bought was not a model of architecture, but it was large and capable of receiving improvement. The house adjoining it, which was to be the nucleus of a Sisters' house, was roomy and shabby. It had rather had pretensions to elegance in days very long past, but it had gone through varied and not improving experiences, and was a pretty forlorn place when St. John took it in hand. It seemed to him so renovated and advanced, in comparison, that he could not understand his sister's slight shudder and look of repugnance as they entered the bare hall. Of course there were no carpets, as became a Sisters' house, and the rooms that Missy saw as she passed them were very plain indeed as to furniture, and very uncheerful as to outlook. Naturally, you cannot have a house in the midst of the lowest population of a large city, whose windows would have a pleasing or cheerful outlook.

But when Missy came to her mother's room, it was different to her from the others, and not repugnant. It was a large room, of course plainly furnished; but the color of the walls, the few ornaments, the bookshelves, all proclaimed that St. John had not been as severe in arranging his mother's room, as in the treatment of his own. This house "joined hard to the synagogue," and a door had been cut through on this second story, and a little gallery built, and there, at all the hours, Mrs. Varian could go. It was never necessary for her to leave her room. What a center that room became of helpful sympathy, of tender counsel, of rest for tired workers! What a sanctuary of peaceful contemplation, of satisfied longing, of exalted faith! It was the dream of her life fulfilled; the prayer alike of her innocence and penitence answered.

From the little gallery that overhung the church, she heard her son's voice in the grey dawn, as he celebrated the earliest Eucharist, and from that hour, perhaps, she did not hear it again till, at eight o'clock in the evening, he came to her room for a half-hour's refreshment after the hard work of his day. The clergy house was on the other side of the church, about half a block away. It was as yet a very miserable affair, only advanced by an application of soap and water from its recent office of mechanics' boarding-house. But St. John seemed to think that half-hour in his mother's peaceful room made up for all. It was very self-indulgent, but he always took a cup of tea from her hands, which she made him out of a little silver tea-pot that she had used since he was a baby a week old. And the cup out of which he drank it, was of SÊvres china, a part of the cadeau brought to the pretty young mother's bedside in that happy week of solicitude. This little service was almost the only souvenir they had brought of the past life now laid away by both of them, but it was very sacred and very sweet, and probably not very sinful. It was a fact, however, that St. John reproached himself sometimes for the eagerness with which he looked forward to this little soulagement, during the toils of the day. If he had not felt that it was perhaps as dear and necessary to his mother, I am afraid he would have given it up.

Missy saw all this, and much more, of their life, and wondered, as she lay on the lounge that had been brought for her into her mother's room. She saw and wondered, at the interested happy lives of the women in long black dresses, who came and went, in their gliding, silent way, in and out of her mother's room. She could not help seeing, that in the offices, to which the inevitable bell was always calling them, there was no monotony, not so much weariness as in the one-day-in-seven service in a country parish. Their poor, their housekeeping, the interests of their order, seemed to supply all beside that they needed. There was no denying it, their faces were satisfied and happy—except one sister who had dyspepsia, and nobody can look entirely satisfied and happy who has dyspepsia, in the world, or out of it.

As to her mother, there was no visible failure in health, but a most visible increase of mental power and energy, and the inexpressible look that comes from doing work your heart is in, from walking in the path for which your feet were formed. Patient doing of duty against the grain may be better than not doing duty at all, but it always writes a weary mark across the face. That mark which her mother's face had borne, ever since Missy could remember it, was gone.

Weary no doubt she often was, for her hand and brain were rarely idle now; but it was the healthy weariness that brings the sleep of the just, and wipes out toil with rest. Neither did Missy understand—how could she?—the bliss of those hours spent in the little gallery that overlooked the empty and silent church. She could have understood the thrill that it might have given her, to see the crowd that sometimes filled the church, hanging upon the words of the preacher, if that preacher had been her son. But, alas for Missy! St. John did only humble out-of-sight work. He rarely preached, and then only to supply some one's place, who had been called away or hindered by illness. There were two or three priests, older than he, who did the work that appeared to the world, and who were above him in everything, and who were praised, and who had influence. What was St. John, who had given all his money, and all his time, and all his heart, to this work? The lowest one of all, of less authority or influence or consideration than any. Well, if he was satisfied, no one need complain, and he evidently was.