really was? Something in me rebelled.
Yet the words I had been reading were final and absolute. "The world
knoweth us _not_;" and "us," I knew meant the little band in whose
hearts Christ is king. Surely I was one of them. But I was unwilling
to slip out of the world's view and be seen by it no more. I
struggled.

It was something very new in my experience. I had certainly felt
struggles of duty in other times, but they had never lasted long. This
lasted. With an eye made keen by conscience, I looked now in my
reading to see what else I might find that would throw light on the
matter and perhaps soften off the uncompromising decision of the words
of St John. By and by I came to these words--

"If ye were of the world, the world would love his own. But because ye
are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world,
_therefore the world hateth you_."

I shut the book. The issue could not be more plainly set forth. I must
choose between the one party and the other. Nay, I had chosen;--but I
must agree to belong but to one.

Would anybody say that a child could not have such a struggle? that
fourteen years do not know yet what "the world" means? Alas, it is a
relative term; and a child's "world" may be as mighty for her to face,
as any other she will ever know. I think I never found any more
formidable. Moreover, it is less unlike the big world than some would
suppose.

On the corner of the street, just opposite to our windows, stood a
large handsome house which we always noticed for its flowers. The
house stood in a little green courtyard exquisitely kept, which at one
side and behind gave room for several patches of flower beds, at this
time filled with bulbous plants. I always lingered as much as I could
in passing the iron railings, to have a peep at the beauty within. The
grass was now of a delicious green, and the tulips and hyacinths and
crocuses were in full bloom, in their different oval-shaped beds,
framed in with the green. Besides these, from the windows of a
greenhouse that stretched back along the street, there looked over a
brilliant array of other beauty; I could not tell what; great bunches
of scarlet and tufts of white and gleamings of yellow, that made me
long to be there.

"Who lives in that house?" Miss Bentley asked one evening. It was the
hour before tea, and we were all at our room windows gazing down into
the avenue.

"Why, don't you know?" said slow Miss Macy. "That's Miss Cardi