f pure
sanctity. He was sometimes really timid before her, in the midst of his
frank chivalry.

"I wish you'd tell me," he said suddenly, falling back with her as the
path narrowed again. "What are the 'steps'?"

"It was a verse we found this morning,--Cousin Delight and I," Leslie
answered; and as she spoke the color came up full in her cheeks, and her
voice was a little shy and tremulous. "'The steps of a good man are
ordered by the Lord.' That one word seemed to make one certain.
'Steps,'--not path, nor the end of it; but all the way." Somehow she was
quite out of breath as she finished.

Meantime Sin Saxon and Frank had got with Miss Goldthwaite, and were
talking too.

"Set spinning," they heard Sin Saxon say, "and then let go. That was his
idea. Well! Only it seems to me there's been especial pains taken to
show us it can't be done. Or else, why don't they find out perpetual
motion? Everything stops after a while, unless--I can't talk
theologically, but I mean all right--you hit it again."

"You've a way of your own of putting things, Asenath," said Frank
Scherman,--with a glance that beamed kindly and admiringly upon her and
"her way,"--"but you've put that clear to me as nobody else ever did. A
proof set in the very laws themselves, momentum that must lessen and
lose itself with the square of the distance. The machinery cavil won't
do."

"Wheels; but a living spirit within the wheels," said Cousin Delight.

"Every instant a fresh impulse; to think of it so makes it real, Miss
Goldthwaite,--and grand and awful." The young man spoke with a strength
in the clear voice that could be so light and gay.

"And tender, too. 'Thou layest Thine hand upon me,'" said Delight
Goldthwaite.

Sin Saxon was quiet; her own thought coming back upon her with a
reflective force, and a thrill at her heart at Frank Scherman's words.
Had these two only planned tableaux and danced Germans together before?

Dakie Thayne walked on by Leslie Goldthwaite's side, in his happy
content touched with something higher and brighter through that
instant's approach and confidence. If I were to write down his thought
as he walked, it would be with phrase and distinction peculiar to
himself and to the boy-mind,--"It's the real thing with her; it don't
make a fellow squirm like a pin put out at a caterpillar. She's _good_;
but she isn't _pious!_"

This was the Sunday that lay between the busy Saturday and Monday. "It
is always so wherever