I can tell you. He has
got his sister's horses--Mrs. Burrage don't like sleighing--and Mr.
Burrage begged he would take the horses out. They're gay, but he knows
how to drive. O, won't it be magnificent?"

Lois looked at her sister in silence, unwilling, yet not knowing what
to object; while Madge wrapped herself in a warm cloak, and donned a
silk hood lined with cherry colour, in which she was certainly
something to look at. No plainer attire nor brighter beauty would be
seen among the gay snow-revellers that afternoon. She flung a sparkling
glance at her sister as she turned to go.

"Don't be very long!" Lois said.

"Just as long as he likes to make it!" Madge returned. "Do you think
_I_ am going to ask him to turn about, before he is ready? Not I, I
promise you. Good-bye, hermit!"

Away she ran, and Lois turned again to her window, where all the white
seemed suddenly to have become black. She will marry him!--she was
saying to herself. And why should she not? she has made no promise. _I_
am bound--doubly; what is it to me, what they do? Yet if not right for
me it is not right for Madge. _Is_ the Bible absolute about it?

She thought it would perhaps serve to settle and stay her mind if she
went to the Bible with the question and studied it fairly out. She drew
up the table with the book, and prayed earnestly to be taught the
truth, and to be kept contented with the right. Then she opened at the
well-known words in 2 Corinthians, chap. vi.

"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers"--

"Yoked together." That is, bound in a bond which obliges two to go one
way and pull in one draught. Then of course they _must_ go one way; and
which way, will depend upon which is strongest. But cannot a good woman
use her influence to induce a man who is also good, only not Christian,
to go the right way?

Lois pondered this, wishing to believe it. Yet there stood the command.
And she remembered there are two sides to influence; could not a good
man, and a pleasant man, only not Christian, use his power to induce a
Christian woman to go the wrong way? How little she would like to
displease him! how willingly she would gratify him!--And then there
stands the command. And, turning from it to a parallel passage in 1
Cor. vii. 39, she read again the directions for the marriage of a
Christian widow; she is at liberty to be married to whom she will,
"_only in the Lord_." There could be no question of what is the will of