ad wished, though vainly, to go to a
good boarding-school! and now there was an opportunity for her to have a
twelvemonth's education, without the great drawback of living at school
among strangers and losing the comforts and freedom of home. It was true
that she had only seen her aunt for a short time several years before,
and her cousins were quite unknown, except for the short notes she
usually received at Christmas, with a present from Julia. Still they
were relatives, and would not regard her as a stranger.

There were so many arguments for accepting her aunt's invitation: the
pleasure of the sea-side trip, the change, the novelty of living in a
town, of having Julia for a companion and many school-fellows of her own
age; of exchanging Miss Green's school, with its catechisms and
needlework, for a young ladies' college, with its modern plans of study,
its classes and professors. And all these inducements had the charm of
being new and untried, so that only their agreeable side appeared to
view, the other being unknown.

Yet if there were fewer reasons against the plan, they were very
weighty, for how would mother contrive to do without her? And how could
she bear to live a year without a glimpse of the dear home faces?

"But I only help in the mornings and evenings," she mused, "for I am at
school all day, and perhaps I could come home for a few days at
Christmas. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I wish father and mother
had settled it. It is so difficult to know how to decide."

She did not forget the advice which had been given her--to pray over the
matter. Indeed, I doubt if she would in any case have come to a decision
without taking counsel of her Heavenly Father, for Ruth had for years
been in the habit of carrying her childish troubles and perplexities to
the one unfailing Guide.

And yet she was hardly sure that she was a Christian; and although she
longed to set her mother's mind at rest upon that point, she could not
venture to do so just yet. Like many another child of pious parents, she
had been trained to love good and hate evil; she had been taught to pray
and to desire to live a Christian life; she had long since begun the
never-ending conflict against evil and tried to rule her life and
actions by God's Word; and yet she could not tell whether the promptings
and impulses towards the Saviour which often came to her heart, were
merely the result of the loving sanctified home-influence which had