With this enigmatic introduction, the major made Hester a low bow and handed her a small piece of white paper, twice folded, and tied with a bit of white ribbon. She took it with a sweetly radiant curiosity.

It was the title deed of the house in Addison Square. She gave a cry of joy, got up, threw her arms around majie’s neck, and kissed him.

“Ah!” said the major, “if I was a young man now, I should not have had that! But I know what she means by it—the collective kiss of all the dirty men and women in her dear slums, glorified into that of an angel of God!”

Hester was not a young lady given to weeping, but she did here break down and cry. Her long-cherished dream had come true! She knew she had no money to go with the house, but that did not trouble her. There was always a way of doing when one was willing to begin small!

And this is, indeed, a divine law. There shall be no success to the man who is not willing to begin small. Small is strong, for it only can grow strong. Big at the outset is but bloated and weak. There are thousands willing to do great things for every one who is willing to do a small thing. But there never was any truly great thing that did not begin small.

In her delight, without unfolding it all the way, Hester handed the paper to Mr. Christopher. He took it and, with a questioning look, opened it farther.

The major had known for some time that Mr. Raymount wanted to sell the house, and believed from the way Hester spent her time in London that he could give her no greater joy than to purchase it for her.

“There is more here than you know,” said Christopher, handing her back the paper. She opened it and saw several notes, amounting to something about a thousand pounds. But before the evening was over she learned that it was not a thousand pounds the dear major had given her, but the thousand a year he had offered her if she would give up lord Gartley. Thus a new paradise of God-labour opened on the horizon in the delighted eyes of Hester.

In the evening, when the sun was down, they went for another walk. I suspect the major, but am not sure:—anyhow, in the middle of a fir-wood Hester found herself alone with Christopher.

The wood rose towards the moor, growing thinner and thinner as it ascended. They were climbing westward full in face of the sunset, which was barred across the trees in gold, blue, rosy pink, and a lovely indescribable green, such as is not able to live except in the after sunset. The west lay like the beautiful dead not yet faded into the brown dark of mother-earth. The fir-trees and bars of sunset made a glorious gate before them.

“Oh, Hester!” said Christopher—he had been hearing her called Hester all day long, and it not only came of itself, but stayed unnoticed of either—“imagine if that were the gate of heaven, and we climbing to it now to go in and see all the dear people!”