though Johnny smiled, and stroked his face, he seemed rather
inclined to be quiet and even to sleep; yielding partly to the effect
of weakness and fever, partly to the restless night; and his two
teachers watched him together. Faith was very silent and quiet. Then
suddenly she said,

"Go and take some rest yourself, won't you, Endecott--now."

"I do not feel the need of it--" he said. "I had some snatches of sleep
last night."

She looked at him, but the silence was unbroken again for some little
time longer. At length, pushing aside a lock of hair from the fair
little brow beneath which the eyelids drooped with such unnatural
heaviness, Faith said,--and the tone seemed to come from very stillness
of heart, the words dropped so grave and clear,--

"The name of Christ is good here to-day, Endecott."

"How good! how precious!" was his quick rejoinder. "And how very
precious too, is the love of his will!"--and he repeated softly, as if
half thinking it out--

"'I worship thee, sweet will of God!
And all thy ways adore!
And every day I live, I seem
To love thee more and more.'"

An earnest, somewhat wistful glance of Faith's eye was the answer; it
was not a dissenting answer, but it went back to Johnny. Her lip was a
child's lip in its humbleness.

"It was very hard for me to give him up at first--" Mr. Linden went on
softly; and the voice said it was yet; "but that answers all questions.
'The good Husbandman may pluck his roses, and gather in his lilies at
mid-summer, and, for aught I dare say, in the beginning of the first
summer month.'"--

Faith looked at the little human flower in her arms--and was silent.

"Reuben was telling me yesterday--" she said after a few
minutes,--"what you have been to him."

But her words touched sweet and bitter things--Mr. Linden did not
immediately answer,--his head drooped a little on his hand, and he did
not raise it again until Johnny claimed his attention.

The quiet rest of the little sleeper was passing off,--changing into an
unquiet waking; not with the fear of yesterday but with a restlessness
of discomfort that was not easily soothed. Words and caresses seemed to
have lost their quieting power for the time, though the child's face
never failed to answer them; but he presently held out his arms to Mr.
Linden, with the words, "Walk--like last night."

And for a while then Faith had nothing to do but to look and listen; to
listen to the soft measured