“Oh, Judy,” she said, still seeing the visions conjured up by her book.  “Oh, Judy, you ought to read this—­”

“You know I don’t like to read, Anne.”  Judy’s tone was irritable.

“You would like this,” said Anne, gently, as she drew Judy down beside her.  “It’s about the sea.”  She opened the despised book at the place where she had been reading when Judy plucked it out of her hand.  “Listen.”

Judy did listen, but with her sullen eyes staring out of the window and her shoulders hunched up aggressively.  When Anne stopped however, she said:  “Go on,” and when the chapter was finished, she asked, “Who wrote that?”

“Robert Louis Stevenson.  He was a lovely man, and he wrote lovely books, and he died, and they buried him in Samoa on the top of a mountain.  He wrote some verses called ‘Requiem.’  I think you would like them, Judy.”

“What are they?”

Anne quoted softly, her sweet little voice deep with feeling, and her blue eyes dark with emotion.

  “’Under the wide and stormy sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie,
  Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

  “’This be the verse you grave for me: 
    “Here he lies where he longed to be;
  Home is the sailor—­home from the sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill."’”

“‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea—­’” echoed Judy, under her breath.  “How fine that he could say it like that, Anne.  Tell me about him.”

All the discontent had gone from her face, and she lay back among the cushions of the window-seat quietly, while Anne told her of the young life that had ended in a land of exile.  Of a singer whose song had been stilled so soon, but who would not be forgotten as long as men honor a brave heart and a gentle spirit.

“Let me see the book,” and Judy stretched out her hand, and Anne gave her “Kidnapped” unselfishly, glad to see the softened look in Judy’s eyes, and as the morning passed and the two girls read on and on, they did not notice that the rain had stopped and that the parted clouds showed a gleam of watery sun.

And when lunch was announced, Judy laid her book down with a sigh, and after lunch, in spite of clearing weather, she read until twilight, and having finished one book, would have started another, if Anne had not protested.

“You will wear yourself out,” she said, as the intense Judy looked up with blurred eyes and wrinkled forehead.  “Let’s have a run on the beach.”

Judy never did anything by halves, and after her introduction to books that she liked, she outread Anne.  And as time went on it was her books that soothed her in her restless moods, and because there were in her father’s library the writings of the greatest men and the best men who have given their thoughts to the world, Judy was gradually molded into finer girlhood, finer womanhood, than could have come to her by any other association.