“Oh, Alick, Alick, why am I so foolish?”

“Never mind; I took care Martin should not know it.  Nobody is aware of the little affair but our two selves; and I will take care the fox learns the worth of his prize.  Only now, Rachel, answer me, is there any use left for me still?”

“You should not ask me such things, Alick, you know it all too well.”

“Not so well that I don’t want to hear it.  But I had more to say.  This Martin is a man of very different calibre from old Cox, with a head and heart in London charities and churches, and it had struck him as it did you, that the Homestead had an easier bargain of it than that good namesake of yours had ever contemplated.  If it paid treble or quadruple rent, the dear mother would never find it out, nor grow a geranium the less.”

“No, she would not!  But after all, the lace apprenticeships are poor work.”

“So they are, but Martin says there would be very little difficulty in getting a private bill to enable the trustees to apply the sum otherwise for the benefit of the Avonmouth girls.”

“Then if I had written to him, it would have been all right!  Oh, my perverseness!”

“And, Rachel, now that money has been once so intended; suppose it kept its destination.  About £500 would put up a tidy little industrial school, and you might not object to have a scholarship or two for some of our little —­th Highlander lassies whose fathers won’t make orphans of them for the regular military charities.  What, crying, Rachel!  Don’t you like it?”

“It is my dream.  The very thing I wished and managed so vilely.  If Lovedy were alive!  Though perhaps that is not the thing to wish.  But I can’t bear taking your—­”

“Hush!  You can’t do worse than separate your own from mine.  This is no part of the means I laid before Mr. Martin by way of proving myself a responsible individual.  I took care of that.  Part of this is prize-money, and the rest was a legacy that a rich old merchant put me down for in a transport of gratitude because his son was one of the sick in the bungalow where the shell came.  I have had it these three or four months, and wondered what to do with it.”

“This will be very beautiful, very excellent.  And we can give the ground.”

“I have thought of another thing.  I never heard of an industrial school where the great want was not food for industry.  Now I know the Colonel and Mr. Mitchell have some notion floating in their minds about getting a house for convalescents down here, and it strikes me that this might supply the work in cooking, washing, and so on.  I think I might try what they thought of it.”

Rachel could only weep out her shame and thankfulness, and when Alick reverently added that it was a scheme that would require much thought and much prayer, the pang struck her to the heart—­how little she had prayed over the F. U. E. E. The prayer of her life had been for action and usefulness, but when she had seen the shadow in the stream, her hot and eager haste, her unconscious detachment from all that was not visible and material had made her adhere too literally to that misinterpreted motto, laborare est orare.  How should then her eyes be clear to discern between substance and shadow?