Winner Stories

Next Winner (29) | Previous Winner (27)

And, if we have this feeling with regard to vegetable growth, how
much more with regard to spiritual growth! To attempt to set up
the gradually awakening spirit in an apparatus where it might be
the observed of all observers would be at once repulsive and
presumptuous. Happily, it is impossible. We may trace influences
and suggestions, just as we may note the rain or drought, the heat
or cold that affect vegetable growth, but the actual birth is ever
hidden.
To attempt even to shadow forth Erica's growth during the next year
would be worse than presumptuous. As to her outward life it was
not greatly changed, only intensified. October always began their
busiest six months. There was the night school at which she was
able to work again indefatigably. There were lectures to be
attended. Above all there was an everincreasing amount of work to
be done for her father. In all the positive and constructive side
of secularism, in all the efforts made by it to better humanity,
she took an enthusiastic share. Naturally she did not see so much
of Charles Osmond now that she was strong again. In the press of
business, in the hard, everyday life there was little time for
discussion. They met frequently, but never for one of their long
teteatetes. Perhaps Erica purposely avoided them. She was
strangely different now from the little impetuous girl who had come
to his study years ago, trembling with anger at the lady
superintendent's insult. Insults had since then, alas, become so
familiar to her, that she had acquired a sort of patient dignity of
endurance, infinitely sad to watch in such a young girl.
One morning in early June, just a year after the memorable Hyde
Park meeting, Charles Osmond happened to be returning from the
death bed of one of his parishioners when, at the corner of
Guilford Square, he met Erica. It might have been in part the
contrast with the sad and painful scene he had just quitted, but he
thought she had never before looked so beautiful. Her face seemed
to have taken to itself the freshness and the glow of the summer
morning.
You are early abroad, he said, feeling older and grayer and more
tired than ever as he paused to speak to her.
I am off to the museum to read, she said, I like to get there by
nine, then you don't have to wait such an age for your books; I
can't bear waiting.
What are you at work upon now?
Oh, today for the last time I am going to hunt up particulars
about Livingstone. Hazeldine was very anxious that a series of
papers on his life should be written for our people. What a grand

Next Winner (29) | Previous Winner (27)

Winner Index