get away from
there without their suppers, and so I let the fire right down, and
blacked the stove."

"Never mind," said Faith, abstractedly. "I don't feel hungry." And she
went away, upstairs.

"'M!" said Mis 'Battis, significantly, to herself, running a released
knitting needle through her hair, "don't tell me! I've been through the
mill!"

Half an hour after, she came up to Faith's door.

"The minister's downstairs," said she. "Hope to goodness, he's had _his_
supper!"

"Oh, if I dared!" thought Faith; and her heart throbbed tumultuously.
"Why can't there be somebody to tell me what I ought to do?"

If she had dared, how she could have leaned upon this friend! How she
could have trusted her conscience and her fate to his decision!

"Does anything trouble you to-night, Miss Faith?" asked Mr. Armstrong,
watching her sad, abstracted look in one of the silent pauses that broke
their attempts at conversation. "Are you ill, or tired?"

"Oh, no!" answered Faith, quickly, from the surface, as one often does
when thoughts lie deep. "I am quite well. Only--I am sometimes puzzled."

"About what is? Or about what ought to be?"

"About doing. So much depends. I get so tired--feeling how responsible
everything makes me. I wish I were a little child again! Or that
somebody would just take me and tell me where to go, and where to stay,
and what to do, and what not. From minute to minute, as the things come
up."

Roger Armstrong, with his great, chastened soul, yearned over the child
as she spoke; so gladly he would have taken her, at that moment, to his
heart, and bid her lean on him for all that man might give of help--of
love--of leading!

If she had told him, in that moment, all her doubt, as for the instant
of his pause she caught her breath with swelling impulse to do!

"'And they shall all be led of God';" said the minister. "It is only to
be willing to take His way rather than one's own. All this that seems to
depend painfully upon oneself, depends, then, upon Him. The act is
human--the consequences become divine."

Faith was silenced then. There was no appeal to human help from that.
Her impulse throbbed itself away into a lonely passiveness again.

There was a distance between these two that neither dared to pass.

A word was spoken between mother and daughter as they parted for the
night.

"Mother! I have such a thing to think of--to decide!"

It was whispered low, and with cheek hidden on her mothe