Guy had said it would be pleasant for her to refer to its pages in after years, little dreaming with what sore anguish of heart poor Daisy would one day weep over the senseless things recorded there.

“Can it be I was ever that silly little fool?” she said bitterly, as she finished her journal.  “And how could Guy love me as I know he did.  Oh, if I but had the chance again, I would make him so happy!  Oh, Guy, Guy—­my husband still—­mine more than Julia’s, if you could know how much I love you now; nor can I feel it wrong to do so, even though I never hope to see your face again.  Guy, Guy, the world is so desolate, and I am young, only twenty-three, and life is so long and dreary with nothing to live for or to do.  I wish almost that I were dead like Tom, only I dare not think I should go to heaven where he has gone.”

In her sorrow and loneliness Daisy was fast sinking into an unhealthy, morbid state of mind from which nothing seemed to arouse her.

“Nothing to live for—­nothing to do,” was her lament until one golden September day, when there came a turning point in her life, and she found there was something to do.

There was no regular service that Sunday in the church where she usually attended, and as the day was fine and she was far too restless to remain at home, she proposed to her mother that they walk to a little chapel about a mile away, where a young Presbyterian clergyman was to preach.

She had heard much of his eloquence, and as his name was McDonald, he might possibly be some distant relative.  Inasmuch as her father was of Scotch descent she felt a double interest in him, and with her mother was among the first who entered the little, humble building and took a seat upon one of the hard, uncomfortable benches near the pulpit.

The speaker was young—­about Tom’s age—­and with a look on his florid face and a sound in his voice so like that of the dead man that Daisy half started to her feet when he first took his stand in front of her and announced the opening hymn.  His text was:  “Why stand ye here all the day idle?” and so well did he handle it, and so forcible were his gestures and eloquent his style of delivery, that Daisy listened to him spellbound, her eyes fixed intently upon his glowing face and her ears drinking in every word he uttered.

After dwelling for a time upon the loiterers in God’s vineyard, the idlers from choice, who worked not for lack of an inclination to do so, he spoke next of the class whose whole life was a weariness for want of something to do, and to these he said:  “Have you never read how, when the disciples rebuked the grateful woman for wasting upon her Master’s head what might have been sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor, Jesus said unto them, ‘The poor ye have with you always,’ and is it not so, my hearers?  Are there no poor at your door to be fed, no hungry little ones to be cared for out of the abundance which God has only loaned you for