“You are so like a cloud,” said she to Mrs. Buxton.  “Up at the Thorn-tree, it was quite curious how the clouds used to shape themselves, just according as I was glad or sorry.  I have seen the same clouds, that, when I came up first, looked like a heap of little snow-hillocks over babies’ graves, turn, as soon as I grew happier, to a sort of long bright row of angels.  And you seem always to have had some sorrow when I am sad, and turn bright and hopeful as soon as I grow glad.  Dear Mrs. Buxton!  I wish Nancy knew you.”

The gay, volatile, willful, warm-hearted Erminia was less earnest in all things.  Her childhood had been passed amid the distractions of wealth; and passionately bent upon the attainment of some object at one moment, the next found her angry at being reminded of the vanished anxiety she had shown but a moment before.  Her life was a shattered mirror; every part dazzling and brilliant, but wanting the coherency and perfection of a whole.  Mrs. Buxton strove to bring her to a sense of the beauty of completeness, and the relation which qualities and objects bear to each other; but in all her striving she retained hold of the golden clue of sympathy.  She would enter into Erminia’s eagerness, if the object of it varied twenty times a day; but by-and-by, in her own mild, sweet, suggestive way, she would place all these objects in their right and fitting places, as they were worthy of desire.  I do not know how it was, but all discords, and disordered fragments, seemed to fall into harmony and order before her presence.

She had no wish to make the two little girls into the same kind of pattern character.  They were diverse as the lily and the rose.  But she tried to give stability and earnestness to Erminia; while she aimed to direct Maggie’s imagination, so as to make it a great minister to high ends, instead of simply contributing to the vividness and duration of a reverie.

She told her tales of saints and martyrs, and all holy heroines, who forgot themselves, and strove only to be “ministers of Him, to do His pleasure.”  The tears glistened in the eyes of hearer and speaker, while she spoke in her low, faint voice, which was almost choked at times when she came to the noblest part of all.

But when she found that Maggie was in danger of becoming too little a dweller in the present, from the habit of anticipating the occasion for some great heroic action, she spoke of other heroines.  She told her how, though the lives of these women of old were only known to us through some striking glorious deed, they yet must have built up the temple of their perfection by many noiseless stories; how, by small daily offerings laid on the altar, they must have obtained their beautiful strength for the crowning sacrifice.  And then she would turn and speak of those whose names will never be blazoned on earth—­some poor maid-servant, or hard-worked artisan, or weary governess—­who have gone on through life quietly, with holy purposes in their hearts, to which they gave up pleasure and ease, in a soft, still, succession of resolute days.  She quoted those lines of George Herbert’s: