“Cousin,” she said, “I am most glad to see you.  Everybody has some work to do to-day.”

“And you, Annie?”

“In this world I have no work to do,” she answered.  “My soul is here for a purchase; when I have made it I shall go home again.”  And Hyde looked at her with such curious interest that she added—­“I am buying Patience.”

“O indeed, that is a commodity not in the market.”

“I assure you it is.  I buy it daily.  Once I used to wonder what for I had come to earth.  I had no strength, no beauty, nothing at all to buy Earth’s good things with.  Three years ago I found out that I had come to buy for my soul, the grace of Patience.  Do you remember what an imperious, restless, hard-to-please, hard-to-serve girl I was?  Now it is different.  If people do not come on the instant I call them, I rock my soul to rest, and say to it ‘anon, anon, be quiet, soul.’  If I suffer much pain—­and that is very often—­I say Soul, it is His Will, you must not cry out against it.  If I do not get my own way, I say, Soul, His Way is best; and thus, day by day, I am buying Patience.”

“But it is not possible this can content you.  You must have some other hope and desire, Annie?”

“Perhaps I once had—­and to-day is a good time to speak of it to you, because now it troubles me no longer.  You know what my father desired, and what your father promised, for us both?”

“Yes.  Did you desire it, Annie?”

“I do not desire it now.  You were ever against it?”

“Oh Annie!—­”

“It makes no matter, George.  I shall never marry you.”

“Do you dislike me so much?”

“I am very fond of you.  You are of my race and my kindred, and I love every soul of the Hydes that has ever tarried on this earth.”

“Well then?”

“I shall marry no one.  I will show you the better way.  Few can walk in it, but Doctor Roslyn says, he thinks it may be my part—­my happy part—­ to do so:”  and as she spoke she took from the little pocket at her side a small copy of the gospels, and it opened of its own account at the twentieth chapter of St. Luke.  “See!” she said, “and read it for yourself, George—­”

“The children of this world marry and are given in marriage.  But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.

“Neither can they die any more; for they are equal unto the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.” [Footnote:  St. Luke, chap. xx. 34-36.]

“To die no more!  To be like unto the angels!  To be the children of God!  This is the end and aim of my desires, to be among ’the children of God!’”

“Dear Annie, I cannot understand this.”

“Not yet.  It is not your time.  My soul, I think, is ages older than yours.  It takes ages of schooling to get into that class that may leave Earth forever, and be as the angels.  Even now I know, I am sure that you are fretting and miserable for the love of some woman.  For whose love, George?  Tell me.”