He was standing at that moment under one of the
wall-texts that the gaslight illumined until it glowed, and the words
stood out with startling clearness:--
"Let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober."
His sister's text; one that, perhaps more than any other, was on her
lips when she talked with him; one that hung at her coffin's head when
he, a little boy, stood beside the coffin and looked down at her face,
and looked up at that text, and took a mental photograph of both to live
in his heart forever.
"This is your special chair," Mrs. Roberts said, smiling up at him; and
he understood her,--here was his opportunity to live out that text for
his sister. Wouldn't he try!
"Well," said Gracie, drawing a long breath, "as a study it is certainly
a success. One can easily see, Flossy, why you were born with the
ability to tell at a glance what colors harmonized, and just where
things fitted in. I can't imagine anything prettier than this, and I
cannot imagine what you are going to do with it."
Whereupon they sat down to talk that important question over: what they
were going to try to do. Sometimes I have wondered whether Ester, from
her beautiful home, could look down on it all, and whether she smiled
over the fact that her work was doing so much more than she had planned?
She had roused in her little brother an ambition that had grown with his
years, and that had helped to hold him away from many temptations: so
much, doubtless, she had foreseen; but what a blessed thing it was that
she had touched, in those long ago years, influences which had drawn her
brother, in his young and perilous manhood, into intimate relations with
such people as Mr.
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