“You make one great error, my child,” he once said, in response to one of Polly’s outbursts of grief; “and it is an error young people very naturally fall into.  You think that no one was ever chastened as you are.  You say, with Jeremiah, ’No prophet is afflicted like unto this prophet!’ Now you are simply bearing your own share of the world’s trouble.  How can you hope to escape the universal lot?  There are dozens of people within sight of this height of land who have borne as much, and must bear as much again.  I know this must seem a hard philosophy, and I should not preach it to any but a stout little spirit like yours, my Polly.  These things come to all of us; they are stern facts; they are here, and they must be borne; but it makes all the difference in the world how we bear them.  We can clench our fists, close our lips tightly, and say, ‘Since I must, I can;’ or we can look up and say cheerfully, ‘I will!’ The first method is philosophical and strong enough, but there is no sweetness in it.  If you have this burden to carry, make it as light, not as heavy, as you can; if you have this grief to endure, you want at least to come out of it sweeter and stronger than ever before.  It seems a pity to let it go for nothing.  In the largest sense of the word, you can live for your mother now as truly as you did in the old times; you know very well how she would have had you live.”

Polly felt a sense of shame steal over her as she looked at Dr. George’s sweet, strong smile and resolute mouth, and she said, with the hint of a new note in her voice:—­

“I see, and I will try; but how does one ever learn to live without loving,—­I mean the kind of loving I had in my life?  I know I can live for my mother in the largest sense of the word, but to me all the comfort and sweetness seems to tuck itself under the word in its ‘little’ sense.  I shall have to go on developing and developing until I am almost developed to death, and go on growing and growing in grace until I am ready to be caught up in a chariot of fire, before I can love my mother ‘in the largest sense of the word.’  I want to cuddle my head on her shoulder, that’s what I want.  Oh, Dr. George, how does one contrive to be good when one is not happy?  How can one walk in the right path when there does n’t seem to be any brightness to go by?”

“My dear little girl,” and Dr. George looked soberly out on the ocean, dull and lifeless under the gray October sky, “when the sun of one’s happiness is set, one lights a candle called ‘Patience,’ and guides one’s footsteps by that!”

“If only I were not a rich heiress,” said Polly next morning, “I dare say I should be better off; for then I simply could n’t have gone to bed for two or three months, and idled about like this for another.  But there seems to be no end to my money.  Edgar paid all the bills in San Francisco, and saved twenty out of our precious three hundred and twelve dollars.  Then Mrs.