“This is like life,” said the pastor, looking down at the precious face beside him:  “our eyes can best see from under the shadow of afflictions.”

“I would rather it were from under the shadow of God’s wings,” replied Dorothy timidly.

“So it is! so it is!  Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings,” said her father eagerly.  “Keep there, my child, and you will never need the afflictions I have needed.  I have been a hard one to save.”

But the child thought within herself, “Alas, father! you have never had any afflictions which you or I either could not bear tenfold better than what I have to bear.”  She was perhaps right.  Only she did not know that when she got through, all would be transfigured with the light of her resurrection, just as her father’s poverty now was in the light of his plenty.

Little more passed between them in the street.  All the way to the entrance of the park they were silent.  There they exchanged a few words with the sweet-faced little dwarf-woman that opened the gate, and those few words set the currents of their thoughts singing yet more sweetly as they flowed.  They entered the great park, through the trees that bordered it, still in silence, but when they reached the wide expanse of grass, with its clumps of trees and thickets, simultaneously they breathed a deep breath of the sweet wind, and the fountains of their deeps were broken up.  The evening was lovely, they wandered about long in delight, and much was the trustful converse they held.  It was getting dark before they thought of returning.

The father had been telling the daughter how he had mourned and wept when his boys were taken from him, never thinking at all of the girl who was left him.

“And now,” he said, “I would not part with my Dorothy to have them back the finest boys in the world.  What would my old age be without you, my darling?”

Dorothy’s heart beat high.  Surely there must be a Father in heaven too!  They walked a while in a great silence, for the heart of each was full.  And all the time scarce an allusion had been made to the money.

As they returned they passed the new house, at some distance, on the highest point in the park.  It stood unfinished, with all its windows boarded up.

“The walls of that house,” said Mr. Drake, “were scarcely above ground when I came to Glaston.  So they had been for twenty years, and so they remained until, as you remember, the building was recommenced some three or four years ago.  Now, again, it is forsaken, and only the wind is at home in it.”

“They tell me the estate is for sale,” said Dorothy.  “Those building-lots, just where the lane leads into Pine street, I fancy belong to it.”

“I wish,” returned her father, “they would sell me that tumble-down place in the hollow they call the Old House of Glaston.  I shouldn’t mind paying a good sum for it.  What a place it would be to live in!  And what a pleasure there would be in the making of it once more habitable, and watching order dawn out of neglect!”