that she will do it, if they
don't take care."

After that, Uncle Titus fixed his attention upon her yet more
closely; and at this time Desire stumbled upon things in a strange
way among his bookshelves, and thought that Rachel Froke was growing
less precise in her fashion of putting to rights. Books were tucked
in beside each other as if they had been picked up and bestowed
anyhow; between "Heaven and Hell" and the "Four Leading Doctrines,"
she found, one day, "Macdonald's Unspoken Sermons," and there was a
leaf doubled lengthwise in the chapter about the White Stone and the
New Name. Another time, a little book of poems, by the same author,
was slid in, open, over the volumes of Darwin and Huxley, and the
pages upon whose outspread faces it lay were those that bore the
rhyme of the blind Bartimeus:--

"O Jesus Christ! I am deaf and blind;
Nothing comes through into my mind,
I only am not dumb:
Although I see Thee not, nor hear,
I cry because Thou mayst be near
O Son of Mary! come!"

Do you think a girl of seventeen may not be feeling out into the
spiritual dark,--may not be stretching helpless hands, vaguely,
toward the Hands that help? Desire Ledwith laid the book down again,
with a great swelling breath coming up slowly out of her bosom, and
with a warmth of tears in her earnest little eyes. And Uncle Titus
Oldways sat there among his papers, and never moved, or seemed to
look, but saw it all.

He never said a word to her himself; it was not Uncle Titus's way to
talk, and few suspected him of having anything to say in such
matters; but he went to Friend Froke and asked her,--

"Haven't you got any light that might shine a little for that child,
Rachel?"

And the next Sunday, in the forenoon, Desire came in; came in,
without knowing it, for her little light.

She had left home with the family on their way to church; she was
dressed in her buff silk pongee suit trimmed with golden brown bands
and quillings; she had on a lovely new brown hat with tea roses in
it; her gloves and boots were exquisite and many buttoned; Agatha
and Florence could not think what was the matter when she turned
back, up Dorset Street, saying suddenly, "I won't go, after all."
And then she had walked straight over the hill and down to Greenley
Street, and came in upon Rachel, sitting alone in a quiet gray
parlor that was her own, where there were ferns and ivies