ed it: and now have I no chance to learn,
and everything to hinder. I don't know a soul I could ask about it."

"The priest," suggested Mr Ewring a little constrainedly. This
language astonished him from Nicholas Clere's daughter.

"I don't want the priest's way. He isn't going himself; or if he is,
it's back foremost. Master Ewring, help me! I mean it. I never wist a
soul going that way save Bessy Foulkes: and she's got there, and I want
to go _her_ way. What am I to do?"

Mr Ewring did not speak for a moment. He was thinking, in the first
place, how true it was that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the
Church"; and in the second, what very unlikely subjects God sometimes
chooses as the recipients of His grace. One of the last people in
Colchester whom he would have expected to fill Elizabeth Foulkes' vacant
place in the ranks was the girl who sat in the porch, looking up at him
with those anxious, earnest eyes.

"Mistress Amy," he said, "you surely know there is peril in this path?
It were well you should count the cost afore you enter on it."

"Where is there not peril?" was the answer. "I may be slain of
lightning to-morrow, or die of some sudden malady this next month. Can
you say surely that there is more peril of burning than of that? If
not, come to mine help. I must find the way somehow. Master Ewring, I
want to be _safe_! I want to feel that it will not matter how or when I
go, because I know whither it shall be. And I have lost the way. I
thought I had but to do well and be as good as I could, and I should
sure come out safe. And I have tried that way awhile, and it serves
not. First, I can't be good when I would: and again, the better I am--
as folks commonly reckon goodness--the worser I feel. There's somewhat
inside me that won't do right; and there's somewhat else that isn't
satisfied when I have done right; it wants something more, and I don't
know what it is. Master Ewring, you do. Tell me!"

"Mistress Amy, what think you religion to be?"

"Nay, I always thought it were being good. If it's not that, I know not
what it is."

"But being good must spring out of something. That is the flower. What
is the seed--that which is to make you `be good,' and find it easy and
pleasant?"

"Tell me!" said Amy's eyes more than her words.

"My dear maid, religion is fellowship; living fellowship with the living
Lord. It is neither being good nor doing good, though both will s