'Yes, Richard.'
It was my turn to feel something squeeze my heart as in two hands. I’ll never tell you how I felt! For I saw a thousand things at once. I saw what dad meant by my touching life. And I saw the meaning of the path I had chosen blindly. Before me, like a map, were spread their lives and mine, to-day and yesterday. I shook with the passions that had created me. I vibrated with the sacrifices that had gone to make me possible. For the first time in all my days I got a glimpse of what the young generation means to the elder. On my head had descended all their hopes. I was the laden ship that carried their great desires. Mine to lift the torch for all of them—and thank God for the chance!
I struck my tears away and reached out blindly to grasp Seth Miles’s bony hand. I guess he knew I meant it.
BURIED TREASURE
BY MAZO DE LA ROCHE
I
IT was Saturday morning, and we three were together in Mrs. Handsomebody’s parlor—Angel, and The Seraph, and I.
No sooner had the front door closed upon the tall, angular figure of that lady, bearing her market basket, than we shut our books with a snap, ran on tiptoe to the top of the stairs, and, after a moment’s breathless listening, cast our young forms on the smooth walnut banister, and glided gloriously to the bottom.
Regularly on a Saturday morning Mrs. Handsomebody went to market, and with equal regularity we, her pupils, instantly cast off the yoke of her restraint, slid down the banisters, and entered the forbidden precincts of the Parlor.
On other week-days the shutters of this grim apartment were kept closed, and an inquisitive eye, applied to the keyhole, could just faintly discern the portrait in crayon of the late Mr. Handsomebody, presiding, like some whiskered ghost, over the revels of the stuffed birds in the glass case below him.
But on a Saturday morning Mary Ellen swept and dusted there. The shutters were thrown open, and the thin-legged piano and the haircloth furniture were furbished up for the morrow.