ould be very pleasant to be
without a nurse, though we liked ours very well, and to be able to do
just as we wished. But I shall never forget how pleased I was to see her
come back again," and Grandmamma laughed a little at the recollection.

"Why were you so pleased, Grandmamma?" asked Pamela. "Had you done
anyfing naughty?"

"_That_ wouldn't have made Grandmamma pleased for her nurse to come
back," said Duke; and a sudden thought of how "us" would have felt had
Nurse come into the room just as Toby was licking up the last of the
bread and milk made his face grow rosy.

"We had not meant to be naughty," said Grandmamma, "but we were not fit
to manage for ourselves. Each of us wanted to do a different way, and we
were like a flock of poor little sheep without a shepherd. You do not
know, children, what a comfort it is to have rules one must obey."

"But big people don't have to obey," said Duke.

"Ah yes, they have; and when they try to think they have not, then it is
that everything goes wrong with them;" and seeing by the look in the two
little faces that they were still puzzled--"People have to _obey_ all
their lives if they want to be happy," she went on. "Long after they
have no more nurses or fathers and mothers--or grandpapas and
grandmammas," with a little smile, which somehow made the corners of
Duke's and Pamela's mouths go down. "The use of all those when we are
young is only to teach us what obeying means--to teach us to listen to
the voice we should _always_ obey----" and Grandmamma stopped a minute
and looked at "us."

"God," said the two very solemnly.

"Yes; but God speaks to us in different ways, and we have to learn to
know His voice. And the way of all in which we _most_ need to know it is
when it speaks to us in our own hearts--in ourselves. It would be a very
poor sort of being good or obeying if it was only so long as somebody
else was beside us telling us what to do and looking to see that we did
it."

"Yes," said the two little voices together, lower and still more solemn.

"As, for instance, this morning if, just because Nurse was not with you,
you had done anything you would not have done had she been there," said
Grandmamma, looking keenly at the two flushed faces.

Another--"Yes, Grandmamma."

"Or," went on the old lady, speaking more slowly, "a worse kind of
disobeying--the telling what is not really true; lots of people, big as
well as little, do that, and sometimes they try to