hank you, Aunt Alice, Jenny'll stay with her
mother."

"Then you won't allow us to adopt her?" snapped Miss Horner, sitting up
so straight in the cane-bottomed chair that it creaked again and again.

"I don't think," Aunt Fanny put in, "that you are quite old enough to
understand the temptations of a young girl."

"Aren't I?" said Florence. "I think I know a sight more about 'em than
you do, Aunt Fanny. I am a mother, when all's said and done."

"But have you got salvation?" asked Miss Horner.

"I don't see what salvation and that all's got to do with my Jenny,"
Mrs. Raeburn argued.

"But you would like her to be sure of everlasting happiness?" inquired
Miss Fanny mildly, amazed at her niece's obstinacy.

"I'd like her to be a good girl, yes."

"But how can she be good till she has found the Lord? We're none of us
good," declared Miss Mary, "till we have been washed in the blood of the
Lamb."

"I quite believe you're in earnest, Aunt Alice," declared Mrs. Raeburn,
"in earnest, and anxious to do well by Jenny, but I don't hold and never
did hold with cooping children up. Poor little things!"

"There wouldn't be any cooping up. As a child of grace, she would often
go out walking with her aunts, and sometimes, perhaps often, be allowed
to carry the tracts."

Mrs. Raeburn looked down in the round blue eyes of Jenny.

"Perhaps you'd like her to jump to glory with a tambourine?" she said.

"Jump to glory with a tambourine?" echoed Miss Horner.

"Or bang the ears off of Satan with a blaring drum? Or go squalling up
aloft with them saucy salvation hussies?"

The austere old ladies were deeply shocked by the levity of their
niece's inquiries.

Sincerely happy, sincerely good, they were unable to understand any one
not burning to feel at home in the whitewashed chapel which to them was
an abode of murmurous peace. They wanted everybody to recognize with
glad familiarity every text that decorated the bleak walls with an
assurance of heavenly joys. Their quiet encounters with spiritual facts
had nothing in common with those misguided folk who were escorted by
brass bands along the shining road to God. They were happy in the
exclusiveness of their religion, not from any conscious want of charity,
but from the exaltation aroused by the privilege of divine intimacy and
the joyful sense of being favorites in heavenly places. The Rev. Josiah
Williams, for all his liver-colored complexion and clayey nose, was to
them