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She was thinking with a wee glow of pleasure how the baby’s arms clung around her neck that morning, and how surprised her mother looked when Methuselah cried at her taking this walk. As you were warned in the beginning, nothing remarkable ever happened to Sharley. Since she had begun in practice to approve Mrs. Dike’s theory, that no harm is done if we never think of our troubles, she had neither become the village idol, nor in any remarkable degree her mother’s pride. But she had nevertheless cut for herself a small niche in the heart of her home,—a much larger niche, perhaps, than the excellent Mrs. Guest was well aware of.

“I don’t care how small it is,” cried Sharley, “as long as I have room to put my two feet on and look up.”

And for that old pain? Ah, well, God knew about that, and Sharley,—nobody else. Whatever the winter had taught her she had bound and labelled in h
er precise little way for future use. At least she had learned—and it is not everybody who learns it at eighteen,—to wear her life bravely—”a rose with a golden thorn.”

I really think that this is the place to end my story, so properly polished off with a moral. So many Sharleys, too, will never read beyond. But being bound in honor to tell the whole moral or no moral, I must add, that while Sharley walked and thought among her hickories there came up a thunder-storm. It fell upon her without any warning. The sky had been clear when she looked at it last. It gaped at her now out of the throats of purple-black clouds. Thunders crashed over and about her. All the forest darkened and reeled. Sharley was enough like other girls to be afraid of a thunder-storm. She started with a cry to break her way through the matted undergrowth; saw, or felt that she saw, the glare of a golden arrow overhead; threw out her hands, and fell crushed, face downward, at the foot of a scorched tree.

When she opened her eyes she was sitting under a wood-pile. Or, to speak more accurately, she was sitting in Mr. Halcombe Dike’s lap, and Mr. Halcombe Dike was under the wood-pile.

It was a low, triangular wood-pile, roofed with pine boards, through which the water was dripping. It stood in the centre of a large clearing, exposed to the rain, but safe.

“Oh!” said Sharley.

“That’s right,” said he, “I knew you were only stunned. I’ve been rubbing your hands and feet. It was better to come here than to run the blockade of that patch of woods to a house. Don’t try to talk.”

“I’m not,” said Sharley, with a faint little laugh, “it’s you that are talking”; and ended with a weak pause, her head falling back where she had found it, upon his arm.

“I wouldn’t talk,” repeated the young man, relevantly, after a profound silence of five minutes. “I was coming ‘across lots’ from the station. You fell—Sharley, you fell right at my feet!”

He spoke carelessly, but Sharley, looking up, saw that his face was white.

“I believe I will get down,” she observed, after some consideration, lifting her head.

“I don’t see how you can, you know,” he suggested, helplessly; “it pours as straight as a deluge out there. There isn’t room in this place for two people to sit.”

So they “accepted the situation.”

The clouds broke presently, and rifts of yellow light darted in through the fragrant, wet pine boards. Sharley’s hair had fallen from her net and covered her face. She felt too weak to push it away. After some thought Halcombe Dike pushed it away for her, reverently, with his strong, warm hand. The little white, trembling face shone out. He turned and looked at it—the poor little face!—looked at it gravely and long.