Lucy not only looked much better, she was exceedingly beautiful.  For her nature reached down to the perennial, and she had kept a child’s capacity to be happy in small, everyday pleasures.  It was always such an easy thing to please her and so difficult for little frets to annoy her.  Harry’s inconsequent, thoughtless ways would have worried and tried some women to the uttermost, for he was frequently less thoughtful and less helpful than he should have been.  But Lucy was slow to notice or to believe any wrong of her husband and even if it was made evident to her she was ready to forgive it, ready to throw over his little tempers, his hasty rudenesses, and his never-absent selfishness, the cloak of her merciful manifest love.

“What a loving little woman she is!” thought John, but really what affected him most was her constant cheerfulness.  No fear could make her doubt and she welcomed the first gleam of hope with smiles that filled the house with the sunshine of her sure and fortunate expectations.  How did she do it?  Then there flashed across John’s mind the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Thou meetest him that rejoiceth, and worketh righteousness.”  God does not go to meet the complaining and the doubting and the inefficient.  He goes to meet the cheerful, the courageous and the good worker; that is, God helps those who help themselves.  And God’s help is not a peradventure; it is potential and mighty to save; “for our Redeemer is strong.  He shall thoroughly plead our cause,” in every emergency of Life.

Very early next morning John turned a happy face homeward.  The hero of today has generally the ball of skepticism attached to his foot, but between John Hatton and the God he loved there was not one shadow of doubt.  John knew and was sure that everything, no matter how evil it looked, would work together for good.

It was a day of misty radiance until the sun rose high and paved the clouds with fire.  Then the earth was glad.  The birds were singing as if they never would grow old, and, Oh, the miles and miles of green, green meadows, far, far greener than the youngest leaves on the trees!  There were no secrets and no nests in the trees yet, but John knew they were coming.  He could have told what kind of trees his favorite birds would choose and how they would build their nests among the branches.

Towards noon he caught the electric atmosphere pouring down the northern mountains.  He saw the old pines clambering up their bulwarks, and the streams glancing and dancing down their rocky sides and over the brown plowed fields below great flocks of crows flying heavily.  Then he knew that he was coming nigh to Hatton-in-Elmete and at last he saw the great elm-trees that still distinguished his native locality.  Then his heart beat with a warmer, quicker tide.  They blended inextricably with his thoughts of mother and wife, child and home, and he felt strongly that mystical communion between Man and Nature given to those