After that the lamp of life burned lower and lower. He rallied again, two days afterward, and was locked in with his lawyer, and gave critical attention to business.

"I imagine that he made important changes in his will," Mr. Chessney said to Claire. "I do not know of what character, though I was called in as a witness. I hope he made special provision for his sister Alice. I think that she is likely to disappoint her parents in their schemes, and it might be greatly to her comfort to be independent, so far as property is concerned. But Louis kept his own counsel. His lawyer told me that he might be failing in body, but he had never seen him clearer in brain. So there will be no trouble about carrying out whatever he has planned."

"I did not know," Claire said, "that he had property to leave, independent of his parents."

"Oh, yes; a large estate, willed to him from his grandfather, absolutely in his own right. It is what has helped to ruin him."

"How good it would be if he could make his money undo, so far as money could, some of the mischief he has done."

"How could money undo it, my friend?"

"Oh, it couldn't. Still, it might relieve the misery which comes from want. I was thinking just then of poor little Mrs. Simpson and her fatherless baby. I have heard that her husband drank his first glass while in Louis Ansted's employ, and that Louis offered it to him, and he did not like to refuse for fear of giving offense. He died with the delirium tremens, and his wife sold her bedclothes and her shoes to buy food for him at the last. Perhaps she would rather starve than take money from poor Louis. Haven't I heard that he was connected with one of the distilleries?"

"Some of his property is invested in that way," Mr. Chessney answered, startled with the remembrance. "I had not thought of it. Poor Alice! I am afraid there is great trouble for her in whatever direction one looks. If Louis leaves his property to her, her father and mother will violently oppose what her intense temperance principles would advocate. I wish Louis had felt like talking these things over with me a little."

Well, the day came when they followed the ruined body to the grave. It rested in a costly coffin, and the funeral appointments were such as became large wealth and the habit of lavish expenditure.

Later, when the will was read, it appeared that the poor heart had taken counsel of One who makes no mistakes. He had done what he could to undo wrong. The income from valuable investments was large, and was left in trust to his sister Alice, to be used at her discretion in relieving the woes of those who had been brought low through the influence of intoxicants. As for the distillery from which half of his income was derived, its business was immediately to cease, its stock was to be destroyed, and its buildings to be made into tenement-houses for the poor.

"The poor boy was not in his right mind when he made such a will," the father said. "Why, it is a sinful waste; it is simply throwing thousands of dollars into the river."

"It is all the influence of that Benedict girl," the mother said, in bitterness of spirit.

But the will stood, and its directions were obeyed with all the promptness that the sister to whose trust the work was left, could force her lawyers. She seemed in feverish haste to have the work of destruction go on. And when her mother accused her of being hopelessly under the influence of "that Benedict girl," and having no mind of her own, her answer was:

"Mamma, you are mistaken. At last I am under the influence of One who has a right to own me, body and soul. Poor Louis found Him at last, and yielded to his power, and followed his direction, and it was through Claire Benedict's influence that he did; and, mamma, if he had known Claire Benedict a few years earlier, we should have him with us to-day. Mamma, the time has come for me to speak plainly. Religion has been nothing but a name to me until lately. I have not believed in its power. It is Claire Benedict who has shown me my mistake, and helped me to see Christ as a sufficient Saviour. I belong to him now for time and eternity, and, mamma, I will never marry a man who does not with his whole heart own Christ as his Master, and who is not as intense and fanatical on the temperance question as my brother became."

She had always been strong-willed. The mother had been wont to say, somewhat boastfully, that her oldest daughter resembled her in strength of purpose.

Human nature is a curious study. What Mrs. Ansted would do, had been a matter of extreme solicitude to several people. Mr. Chessney believed that she would make Alice's life miserable; that she would become Claire Benedict's enemy, and injure her if she could, and that she would withdraw her younger daughters from not only Claire's, but their eldest sister's influence, and from the church to which they had become attached.

"I do not mean that she will do this in revenge," he said to Claire, "or that she will really intend to injure anybody. She is one of those persons who can make herself believe that she is doing God's service by just such management as this. I am sorry for Alice and for the young girls. It gives me a sense of relief and joy to remember that Louis is forever safe from pitfalls, and yet sometimes I can not help wishing that he could have lived for a few months longer. He had great influence over his mother. She tried to manage him, and his indolent will allowed himself to be influenced in a wonderful manner, but when he did really rouse, he had great power over his mother."

Mrs. Ansted did none of the things which were feared. Instead, she turned suddenly, and with apparent loathing, from the life which she had heretofore lived. She sent for Claire one morning, greeted her with a burst of tears as her dear child, and declared that had she understood the feeling between Louis and herself nothing would have given her greater joy than to have welcomed her into the family.

Claire opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. If this were the form of cross that she was to bear, it was peculiar, certainly; but why not bear it as well as any other? Of what use to explain again, what the son's own lips had told, that she had utterly refused the honor offered her—that she had never for a moment desired to be received into this family? If the bereaved mother had really succeeded in making herself believe such folly as this, why not let it pass—the grave had closed over the possibility of its ever being realized?

It was a strange part to play—to accept without outward protest the position of one who would have been a daughter of the house, to hear herself mentioned as Louis Ansted's intended wife; to ride, and walk, and talk with the mother, and help her make believe that she would not for the world have thwarted her son's desires; but Claire, after a few attempts at explanation, dropped the effort. The mother did not wish to believe the truth about this, or many other things, and therefore closed her eyes to them.

She wished also to impress herself and others with the belief that Louis had been in every respect an exemplary, and, indeed, a remarkable young man. She withdrew her connection with the church in town and united by letter with the one at South Plains; avowedly, because "dear Louis was interested in it more than in any other church in the world." She imagined plans that he might have had for the church, and called them his, and eagerly worked them out. She adopted the minister, and his wife and his children, because she had often heard Louis say that he would rather hear that man preach than to hear Doctor Archer; and once he told her that the minister's little girl had a very sweet face, and was a cunning little witch whom he liked to tease. She turned with something like disgust from the very name of VanMarter, protesting that "poor Louis had had a great deal to bear from their advances," and that she had no desire to cultivate their acquaintance further.

On all these strange changes in her mother Alice looked with bewilderment.

"She frightens me," she said to Claire one evening, "I don't know what to think. She contradicts every theory of life I ever heard her express. She attributes to Louis graces that he did not possess. She accuses people of injuring him, who really tried to help him, and she adopts as plans of his, things of which I know he had not even thought. I do not know my mother at all; and as I said, it frightens me. Is she losing her mind?"

Claire had no ready reply to these questionings, for she, too, was puzzled. But Mr. Chessney, as they walked slowly down from the house on the hill, discussing once more the strange change in the woman of the world, advanced a theory which Claire adopted, but which was hardly the one to explain to Alice.

"I think," said Mr. Chessney, "that she is hushing her conscience. It would like to speak loudly to her, and tell her that she is responsible for a ruined life, and she does not mean to listen to it. She is imagining a life she believes Louis might have lived, after the change that came to him on his sick-bed, and is making herself believe that he did live it, and that she was, and is, in hearty accord with it. It is a strange freak of the bewildering human mind, but unless I am mistaken, the woman will not find the peace in it that she is seeking. I think she will have to cry, 'God be merciful to me a sinner,' before her heart will find rest."

And then he added one sentence which set Claire's heart into a strange flutter:

"Claire, when I see the energy with which she carries out one of her imaginings, connected with you, I am very grateful that Louis insisted on my being present at that first interview between you and him, and that I heard the truth from his own lips, for the mother is succeeding in deceiving every one else."

"And I do not know how to help it," Claire said, with troubled voice. "It seems a strange thing to be living a falsehood; but when I try to explain to her, she puts me gently aside, and acts as though I had not spoken; and others have no right to question me about the truth of her theories."

"Except myself. Have I the right? Was it as emphatic a refusal as poor Louis understood it? Believe me, I am not asking merely to gratify idle curiosity."

"There never was anything in it, Mr. Chessney, and there never could have been."

The passage of all these and many other events not chronicled here, consumed the greater portion of the summer vacation. For Claire Benedict was letting the summer slip from her without going home. Sore had been the trial at first; but a few weeks before the term closed, opportunity had been offered her to teach a summer class of city pupils, at prices that were almost equal to her year's salary. What right had she, who wanted to bestow so many luxuries on her mother, to close her eyes to such an opportunity as this, merely because she was homesick for a sight of that mother's face? It had been hard to reconcile the sister, especially, to this new state of things. The gentle mother had long ago learned the lesson that what looked like manifest duty must not be tampered with, no matter how hard to bear; but the hot-hearted young sister refused to see anything in it except an added trial too great to be borne. Many letters had to be written before there was a final reluctant admission that two hundred dollars more to depend on, paltry sum though it was, would make a great difference with the mother's winter comforts. The letter in which poor Dora admitted this was blistered with tears; but the sacrifice was made, and the extra term had been well entered upon.

There was much outside of the class and the life being lived on the hill to occupy Claire's thoughts. I hope you do not suppose that the work on the part of "the girls" had been accomplished during a sort of "spasm," and that now they were ready to drop back into inaction. Nothing was farther from their thoughts. If you have imagined so, you have not understood how thoroughly some of them had sacrificed in order to do. We never forget that for which we sacrifice.

Besides, the habit of thinking first of the church, and the various causes which are the tributaries of the church, was formed. That the work was to go on, was demonstrated in many ways; not the least by the random remarks which came so naturally from the lips of the workers.

"Girls," had Ruth Jennings said, when they lingered one evening after prayer-meeting, "when we cushion these seats, we shall have to send somebody after the material who can carry the carpet and wall paper in his mind's eye. It will never do to have a false note put in here to jar this harmony."

"When we cushion the seats!" Claire heard it, and laughed softly. Who had said that the seats were ever to be cushioned? But she knew they would be, and that before very long.

On another evening, Mary Burton had said:

"Look here! don't you think our very next thing, or, at least, one of the next, ought to be a furnace? I don't like those stove pipes, if they are Russia. A furnace would heat more evenly, and with less dust, and Bud could manage a furnace as well as he can these stoves."

How naturally they talked about their future sacrifices! What would have utterly appalled them a few months before, were spoken of carelessly now as "next things."

Ruth Jennings readily assented to the necessity for a furnace, but added:

"I don't believe we shall have Bud for engineer. He wants to go to school, did you know it? And what is more, Mrs. Ansted intends to send him. Fanny told me about it last night. She says her mother thinks Louis intended that Bud should have an education, and she wants to carry out all his plans. I did not know that Louis Ansted ever had any such plans, did you?"

Then Nettie Burdick, after a thoughtful pause:

"Oh, well, girls, if we can't have Bud for engineer, perhaps we can have him to preach for us some day. He told me last night that if he lived he meant to preach; and I believe he will, and preach well, too. Just think of it: Bud a minister!"