rief.

Minnie waited with great patience for some minutes before she would
allow Mabel to speak again, and then, Mabel protesting that it was all
over, and that she was quite calm again, began with brimming eyes,
notwithstanding her protest. "It must have been the narration of your
happiness that caused me to lose control of myself, I felt the contrast
between it and my own state of mind so keenly, that I was quite
overcome--Oh, Minnie, I would give every drop of mere earthly happiness
to feel for one hour, what you have described!"

Minnie looked at her in astonishment. "Why, Mabel, of course you never
needed to feel such a thing--you have known about these things all your
life!"

"Ah, yes!" replied Mabel, "I have known _about_ them, as you say, but I
have never _known_ them. You know one may know all about a thing or
person, and yet never know it or him by direct experience."

"That is true," said Minnie, reflectively. "But why did you always try
to interest me in them, when you really felt no good effect from them
yourself?"

"Please don't ask me that!" entreated Mabel, "It would be worse than
useless for me to try to explain it, but it is a fact that I have never
known such a change as you talk about--as what we call conversion must
surely imply--so I have never been converted, and that is the reason, I
suppose, why all my efforts to interest you were always vain. How could
I hope to lead you to a Saviour I could not see myself?"

Minnie was silent. She could not understand Mabel's difficulty, and
therefore did not feel able to discuss it. She could not say anything to
comfort or console her either, from her own short experience, because
she felt, notwithstanding all that she had just heard, that Mabel was
years and years before her on the road--further by a long way than all
the years of her life. She felt this but could not say it; it seemed to
hover through her mind like a shadow, and she could not grasp it in
order to put it into words.

Mabel saw how puzzled she was, and realized how dangerous it might be to
her peace to communicate difficulties of such a nature in her present
impressionable state; she therefore endeavoured to divert her mind into
a safer channel by getting her to talk about herself.

"It is very silly of me," she said, "to speak thus to you who have so
newly begun the race. What should you know of such things? Come, we
won't talk about them, and I daresay I shall grow out of such morb