am thinking of working for you."

"I am too small a field."

"But you must be included."

"I can be one little corner; there's all Middlefield beside. Isn't there
work for you as a citizen and as a Christian in our little town? Suppose
you go to Middlefield with the same motives that you would go on a
mission to India, Africa, or the Isles of the Sea! You will not be sent
by any Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, but by him who has
sent you, his disciple, into the world. You have your experience, you
have your strength, you have your love to Christ and your neighbor, to
give them. They need everything in Middlefield. They need young men,
Christian young men. The village needs you, the Church needs you. It
seems too bad for all the young men to rush away from their native place
to make a name, or to make money. Somebody must work for Middlefield. Our
church needs a lecture room and a Sunday school room; the village needs a
reading room--the village needs more than I know. It needs Christian
_push_. Perhaps it needs Hollis Rheid."

"Marjorie, it will change all my life for me."

"So it would if you should go West, as you spoke last night of doing. If
you should study law, as you said you had thought of doing, that would
change the course of your life. You can't do a new thing and keep to the
old ways."

"If I go I shall settle down for life."

"You mean you will settle down until you are unsettled again."

"What will unsettle me?"

"What unsettled you now?"

"Circumstances."

"Circumstances will keep on being in existence as long as we are in
existence. I never forget a motto I chose for my birthday once on a time.
'The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.'"

"He commands us to fight, sometimes."

"And then we must fight. You seem to be undergoing some struggles now.
Have you any opening here?"

"I answered an advertisement this morning, but we could not come to
terms. Marjorie, what you say about Middlefield is worth thinking of."

"That is why I said it," she said archly.

"Would _you _like that life better?"

"Better for you?"

"No, better for yourself."

"I am there already, you know," with rising color.

"I believe I will write to father and tell him I will take his kindness
into serious consideration."

"There is no need of haste."

"He will want to begin to make plans. He is a great planner. Marjorie! I
just thought of it. We will rent Linnet's house this s