I had learned much from my father, but still more from my mother.  Uncle Max had called her a good woman, but she was more than that:  she possessed one of those rare unselfish natures that cannot remain satisfied with their own personal happiness:  they wish to include the whole world.  She wanted to inculcate in me her own spirit of self-sacrifice.  I can remember some of her short, trenchant sentences now.

‘Never mind happiness:  that is God’s gift to a few:  do your duty.’

’If you have loved your fellow-creatures sufficiently you will not be afraid to die.  A good conscience will smooth your pillow.’

And once, in her last illness, when Charlie asked if she were comfortable, ’Not very, but I shall soon be quite comfortable, for I shall hope to forget in heaven how little I have done, after all, here; and yet I always wanted to help others.’

Oh, how good she was!  And Charlie was good too, after the fashion of young men:  not altogether thoughtless, full of the promptings of his kind heart; but Uncle Max was right when he said his last illness had ripened him:  it was not the old careless Charlie who had wooed Lesbia who lay there:  it was another and a better Charlie.

In the old days he had rallied me in a brotherly manner on my old-fashioned, grave ways.  ‘You are not a modern young lady, Ursie,’ he would say; and he would often call me ‘grandmother Ursula’; but all the same he would listen to my plans with the utmost tolerance and good nature.

Ah, those talks in the twilight, before the fatal disease developed itself, and he lay in idle fashion on the couch with his arms under his head, while I sat on the footstool or on the rug in the firelight!  We were to live together,—­yes, that was always the dream; even when Lesbia’s fair face came between us, he would not hear of any difference.  I was to live with him and Lesbia, Lesbia was rich, and, though Charlie had little, they were to marry soon.

I was to form a part of that luxurious household, but my time was to be my own, and I was to devote it to the sick poor of Rutherford.  ’Mind, Ursula, you may work, but I will not have you overwork,’ Charlie had once said, more decidedly than usual; ’you must come home for hours of rest and refreshment.  You have a beautiful voice, and it shall be properly trained; you may sing to your invalids as much as you like, and sometimes I will come and sing too; but you must remember you have social duties, and I shall expect you to entertain our friends.’  And it was the idea of this dual life of home sympathy and outside work that had so strongly seized upon my imagination.

When Charlie died I was too sick at heart to carry out my plan.  ’How can one work alone?’ I would say sorrowfully to myself; but after a time the emptiness of my life and dissatisfaction with my surroundings brought back the old thoughts.