“Indeed!  We are making great plans, aren’t we?”

“Yes, I know it sounds big for me; but Mrs. Minturn says ’there is nothing we cannot do if we do not limit God,’ and Miss Katherine says—­”

“Well, what does Miss Katherine say?” queried her uncle, in an eager tone, as Dorothy paused to count the threads she was taking on her needle.

She looked up quickly into his face, his tone having attracted her.

“I guess you think she is pretty nice, too,” she observed, naively.

“What has put that idea into your small head?”

“Oh! the way you speak of her and look at her sometimes, and—­ well, of course”—­with an appreciative sigh—­“anybody couldn’t help loving her.”

“But you haven’t told me what she said,” persisted the man, but feeling the color mounting in his face as he caught the merry gleam in his sister’s eyes.

“Oh! she said that ’God being the only intelligence, man reflects that intelligence, and there is nothing we cannot learn if we keep that in our thought as we study’; so you see, it is all right for me to plan to go through college if I want to,” and the tone indicated that the matter was settled.

“’Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes,’” quoted Phillip Stanley to himself, as he stooped to recover a spool that rolled from Mrs. Seabrook’s lap.

At the same moment the sound of wheels fell upon their ears; the next, a carriage stopped before their door and a stalwart figure leaped to the ground.

“Papa!” “William!” fell simultaneously from the lips of the mother and daughter—­one with a ring of triumph in her voice, the other with a note of intense yearning in her tones.

The man caught his wife to his breast.

“Sweetheart, it is joy to hold you here once more,” he breathed, as their lips met; and she knew there was no cloud between them.

Then he turned and knelt beside his child, folding her in a long, silent embrace.

One swift glance into her bright, eager, happy face had told him a story that thrilled his soul and made him, for the moment, dumb.

“Papa, you can see, can’t you?—­and you are glad, aren’t you?  “Dorothy at length observed, as she lifted wet but joyful eyes to his bronzed face.

“Darling, I can see, and I am more than ‘glad,’” he returned, in a husky tone, as he gently released her, then arose to greet his brother-in-law.

“Phillip, old boy, it is good to be home again,” he said, as he clasped the outstretched hand, and the hearty grip told the younger man that there would be no controversy between them over a previously mooted question, while he was strangely touched, when he added, with a smile that was somewhat tremulous: 

“The cane is here, Phil, and at your disposal.”

“What is that about a cane, papa?” cried Dorothy, whose quick ears had caught what he had said.