“It is easy to ‘dream noble things,’ dear, but hard to do them ’all day long.’  My own feeling is, if one reaches the results one is struggling for, and does one’s work as well as it lies in one to do it, that keeping boarders is as good service as any other bit of the world’s work.  One is not always permitted to choose the beautiful or glorious task.  Sometimes all one can do is to make the humble action fine by doing it ‘as it is done in heaven.’  Remember, ’they also serve who only stand and wait.’”

“Yes, mamma,” said Polly meekly; “but,” stretching out her young arms hopefully and longingly, “it must be that they also serve who stand and dare, and I ’m going to try that first,—­then I ’ll wait, if God wants me to.”

“What if God wants you to wait first, little daughter?”

Polly hid her face in the sofa-cushions and did not answer.

CHAPTER II.

FORECASTING THE FUTURE.

Two of Mrs. Oliver’s sitting-room windows looked out on the fig-trees, and the third on a cosy piazza corner framed in passion-vines, where at the present moment stood a round table holding a crystal bowl of Gold of Ophir roses, a brown leather portfolio, and a dish of apricots.  Against the table leaned an old Spanish guitar with a yellow ribbon round its neck, and across the corner hung a gorgeous hammock of Persian colored threads, with two or three pillows of canary-colored China silk in one end.  A bamboo lounging-chair and a Shaker rocker completed the picture; and the passer-by could generally see Miss Anita Ferguson reclining in the one, and a young (but not Wise) man from the East in the other.  It was not always the same young man any more than the decorations were always of the same color.

“That’s another of my troubles,” said Polly to her friend Margery Noble, pulling up the window-shade one afternoon and pointing to the now empty “cosy corner.”  “I don’t mind Miss Ferguson’s sitting there, though it used always to be screened off for my doll-house, and I love it dearly; but she pays to sit there, and she ought to do it; besides, she looks prettier there than any one else.  Isn’t it lovely?  The other day she had pink oleanders in the bowl, the cushions turned the pink side up,—­you see they are canary and rose-color,—­a pink muslin dress, and the guitar trimmed with a fringe of narrow pink ribbons.  She was a dream, Margery!  But she does n’t sit there with her young men when I am at school, nor when I am helping Ah Foy in the dining-room, nor, of course, when we are at table.  She sits there from four to six in the afternoon and in the evening, the only times I have with mamma in this room.  We are obliged to keep the window closed, lest we should overhear the conversation.  That is tiresome enough in warm weather.  You see the other windows are shaded by the fig-trees, so here we sit, in Egyptian darkness, mamma and I,