r eyes brightened with
feeling and her cheeks glowed. The whole sublime _romance_ of Missions
was being mapped out to her on the face of that quaint allegory, and her
heart responded warmly.

Curiously enough, her first throbs of conscience were not for herself
but for her father. The portly gentleman who occasionally sat at the
head of the Shipley pew, and who certainly never parted company with his
pocket-book on Sabbath or on any other day, did _he_ give liberally to
Foreign Missions?

She could not determine as to the probabilities of the case. He was
counted a liberal man--people liked to come to him to start
subscriptions; but Flossy felt instinctively that a subscription paper
with her father's name leading it was different, someway, from a quiet,
baize-lined box, and no noise nor words. She doubted whether the cause
had been materially helped by him.

She lost some sentences of the story while she planned ways for
interesting her father and securing liberal donations from him; and then
she was suddenly startled back to personality by hearing some astounding
statements from the reader.

"It would be _so_ easy to drop into a household box the price of an
apple, or a paper, or a glass of peanuts, and yet who does it? Why,
there are young ladies who will actually not give two cents a week from
the money that they waste!"

The rich blood mounted in waves to Flossy's forehead. Apples and papers
were not in her line, but _peanuts_! wasn't there a certain stand which
she passed almost daily on her way down town, and did she ever pass it
without indulging in a glass of peanuts? Neither was that the end. Why,
once started on that list, and her wastes were almost numberless. How
fond she was of cream dates, and how expensive they were; and oranges,
the tempting yellow globes were always shining at her from certain
windows as she passed.

Oh, they were just endless, her temptations and her falls in that
direction--only who had ever supposed that there was any harm in this
lavish treatment of herself and of any friends whom she happened to
meet? Yet it was true that she had never given any money at all to the
work of sending the Bible to those who are without it.

"They will not give two cents a week," said Mrs. Miller. It was true:
she had not given "two cents a week," or even two cents a year--she had
simply ignored the existence of such a need for money. True, she had not
been a Christian; but she was surprised t