“Oh, it’s only fun,” explained Linnet.

“I don’t want to know about my S” confessed Marjorie.  “I’d rather wait and find out.  I want my life to be like a story-book and have surprises in the next chapter.”

“It’s sure to have that,” said her mother.  “We mustn’t try to find out what is hidden.  We mustn’t meddle with our lives, either.  Hurry providence, as somebody says in a book.”

“And we can’t ask anybody but God,” said Marjorie, “because nobody else knows.  He could make any letter come that he wanted to.”

“He will not tell us anything that way,” returned her mother.

“I don’t want him to,” said Marjorie.

“Mother, I was in fun and you are making serious,” cried Linnet with a distressed face.

“Not making it dreadful, only serious,” smiled her mother.

“I don’t see why the letter has to be about your husband,” argued Marjorie, “lots of things will happen to us first”

“But that is exciting,” said Linnet, “and it is the most of things in story-books.”

“I don’t see why,” continued Marjorie, unconvinced, turning an apple around in her fingers, “isn’t the other part of the story worth anything?”

“Worth anything!” repeated Linnet, puzzled.

“Doesn’t God care for the other part?” questioned the child.  “I’ve got to have a good deal of the other part.”

“So have all unmarried people,” said her mother, smiling at the quaint gravity of Marjorie’s eyes.

“Then I don’t see why—­” said Marjorie.

“Perhaps you will by and by,” her mother replied, laughing, for Marjorie was looking as wise as an owl; “and now, please hurry with the apples, for they must bake before tea.  Mr. Woodfern says he never ate baked apple sauce anywhere else.”

Marjorie hoped he would not stay a whole week, as he proposed, if she had to cut the apples.  And then, with a shock and revulsion at herself, she remembered that her father had read at worship that morning something about giving even a cup of cold water to a disciple for Christ’s sake.

Linnet laughed again as she stooped to pick up the doubtful O and crooked S from the oilcloth.

But the letters had given Marjorie something to think about.

I had decided to hasten over the story of Marjorie’s childhood and bring her into her joyous and promising girlhood, but the child’s own words about the “other part” that she must have a “good deal” of have changed my mind.  Surely God does care for the “other part,” too.

And I wonder what it is in you (do you know?) that inclines you to hurry along and skip a little now and then, that you may discover whether Marjorie ever married Hollis?  Why can’t you wait and take her life as patiently as she did?

That same Saturday evening Marjorie’s mother said to Marjorie’s father, with a look of perplexity upon her face,