my certain knowledge there isn't a single star visible; in fact, I
should say nothing could be visible but the darkness."

For a minute Flossy made no answer. She did not move nor turn her head;
but presently she said, in a low and gentle voice:

"Ruth, should you be afraid to die?"

"To die!" said Ruth; and I have no means of telling you what an
astonished face and voice she had. "Flossy Shipley, what do you mean?"

"Why, I mean _that_," said Flossy, in the same quiet tone. "Of course we
have got to die, and everybody knows it; and what I say is, should you
be afraid if it were to-night, you know?"

"Humph!" said Ruth, turning her pillow and waiting to beat it into shape
before she spoke further. "I haven't the least idea of dying to-night."

"But how can you be _sure_ of that? You might _have_ to die to-night,
you know people do sometimes."

"I know one thing, am perfectly certain of it, and that is, that you
will take cold standing there and making yourself dismal. You are
shivering like a leaf, I can see you from here. If that is all the good
to be gotten from the 'religious impressions' that they harp about being
so great here, the less religion they have the better, and there is
quite little enough you may be sure." Saying which, Ruth turned her
pillow again and her head, so that she could not see the small creature
at the window. She was unaccountably rasped, not to say startled, by
her question, and she did not like to be startled; she liked to have her
current of life run smoothly.

As for Flossy, she gave a great sigh of disappointment and unrest, and
turned slowly from the window. She had vaguely hoped for help of some
sort from Ruth, and as she lay down on her prayerless pillow she said to
herself, "If she had only knelt down I should certainly have done so,
too; and perhaps I might have been helped out of this dreadful feeling."
Yet so ignorant was she of the way that it never once occurred to her to
kneel alone and pray.

No more words were spoken by those two girls that night, but each lay
awake for a long time and tossed about restlessly. Ruth had been most
effectually disturbed, and try as best she could it was impossible to
banish the memory of those quiet words: "You might _have_ to die
to-night; people do, you know." To actually _have_ to do something that
she had not planned to do and was not quite ready for, would be a new
experience to this girl. Yet when would she be ready to plan for d